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I 






THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



THE LORE OF THE 
HONEY-BEE 



BY 

TICKNER EDWARDES 



NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 

31 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 
1911 



TO THE 

CHAIRMAN OF THE BRITISH BEE- KEEPERS* 
ASSOCIATION, 

THOMAS WILLIAM COWAN, F.L.S., etc., 

TO WHOSE LABOURS AND RESEARCHES 

THE WRITER, AND ALL OTHER BEE-KEEPERS, 

ARE UNDER A LASTING OBLIGATION. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



INTRODUCTION 

THE OLDEST CRAFT UNDER THE SUN - ix 

CHAPTER 

I. — THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE - I 

II. — THE ISLE OF HONEY - - - 12 

III. — BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE ACxES - 19 

IV. — AT THE CITY GATES ' ' ~ ~ 34 

V, — THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE - 46 

VI. — EARLY WORK IN THE BEE-CITY - - 58 

VII. — THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 65 

VIII. — THE BRIDE-WIDOW - - 80 

IX. — THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE 87 

X. A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY - ICO 

XI. — THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM - - 120 

XII. — THE COMB-BUILDERS - - - - 1 34 

XIII. — " WHERE THE BEE SUCKS " - - - 151 

XIV. THE DRONE AND HIS STORY - - - l6l 

XV. — AFTER THE FEAST - - - - - I J2 

XVI. — THE MODERN BEE-FARM - - - I jS 

XVII, — BEE-KEEPING AND THE SIMPLE LIFE - 1 85 

vii 



INTRODUCTION 

THE OLDEST CRAFT UNDER THE SUN 

/^NE of the oldest and prettiest fables in ancient 
^^ mythology is that which deals with the origin 
of the honey-bee. It was to Melissa and her sister 
Amalthea, the beautiful daughters of the King of 
Crete, that the god Jupiter was entrusted by his 
mother Ops, when Saturn, his father — following his 
custom of devouring his children at birth — sought 
to make the usual meal of this, his latest offspring. 

The story is variously rendered by ancient writers. 
Some say that bees already existed in the world, and 
that Amalthea was only a goat, whose milk served 
to nourish the baby-god, in addition to the honey 
that Melissa obtained from the wild bees in the cave 
where Jupiter lay hidden. Another account has it 
that the bees themselves were drawn to his place of 
concealment by the noise made by his nurses, who 
beat continually on brazen pans to keep the suund of 
his infant lamentations from the ears of his ravening 
sire. Thenceforward the bees took over the charge of 
him, bringing him daily rations of honey until he 
grew up and was able to hold his own in the Olympian 
theogony. In either case Jupiter showed his grati- 
tude towards his preservers in true celestial fashion. 
It was a very ancient belief among the earliest writers 
that, in the single instance of the honey-bee, the 
ordinary male-and-female principle was abrogated, 



x THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

and that the propagation of the species took place 
by miraculous means. In explanation of this, we are 
told it was a special gift from Jupiter in acknowledg- 
ment of the unique service rendered him. In one 
version of the fable, and in the words of a famous 
bee-master who wrote in 1657, "Jupiter, for so great 
a benefit, bestowed on his nurses for a reward that 
they should have young ones, and continue their 
kind, without wasting themselves in venery." In 
the other, and probably much older form of the 
legend, Melissa, the beautiful Princess of Crete, was 
herself changed by the god into a bee, with the like 
immaculate propensities ; and thenceforward the 
work of collecting honey for the food of man — that 
honey which, down to a very few centuries from the 
present time, was universally believed to be a miracu- 
lous secretion from heaven — was confided to her 
descendants. 

Apart, however, from the old dim tales of ancient 
mythology, where there is a romance to account for 
all beginnings of the world and everything upon it, 
any attempt to trace back the art of bee-keeping 
to its earliest inception cannot fail to bring us to 
the conclusion that it is inevitably and literally the 
oldest craft under the sun. Thousands of years be- 
fore the Great Pyramid was built, bee-keeping must 
have been an established and traditional occupation 
of man. It must have been common knowledge, 
stamped with the authority of the ages, that a bee- 
hive, besides its toiling multitudes, contained a single 
large ruling bee, divine examplar of royalty ; for 
how else would the bee have been chosen to repre- 
sent a King in the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols ? 
But it is not only within the limit of historical times, 



INTRODUCTION xi 

however remote, that evidences of bee-culture, or 
at least of man's use of honey and wax in his daily 
life, are to be found or inferred. So far back as 
the Bronze Age it is certain that wax was used in 
casting ornaments and weapons. A model of the 
implement was first made in some material that 
would perish under heat. This was imbedded in 
clay, and the model burnt out, after which the mould 
thus formed was filled with the molten metal. These 
models, no doubt, were in many cases carved out 
of wood ; but it is certain that another and more 
ductile material was often used. Bronze ornaments 
have been found with thumbmarks upon them, 
obviously chance impressions on the original model 
faithfully reproduced. And the substance of these 
models could hardly have been anything else than 
beeswax. 

But speculation on the probable antiquity of bee- 
keeping need not stop here. The best authorities 
estimate that human life has existed on the earth for 
perhaps a hundred thousand years. The earliest 
traces of man, far back in the twilight of palaeolithic 
times, reveal him as a hunting and fighting animal, in 
whom the instinct to cultivate the soil or domesti- 
cate the creatures about him ;had not yet developed. 
Later on in the Stone Age — but still in infinitely 
remote times — it is evident that he tamed several 
creatures, such as the ox, the sheep, and the goat, 
keeping them in confinement, and killing them for 
food as he required it, instead of resorting to the old 
ceaseless roaming after wild game. At this time, too, 
he took to sowing corn, and even baking or charring 
some sort of bread. It must be remembered that if 
a hundred thousand years is to be set down as the 



xii THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

limit of man's life on the earth, probably the develop- 
ment of other living creatures, as well as most forms of 
vegetable life, took place immeasurably earlier. The 
chances are that the world of trees and flowering- 
plants, in which aboriginal man moved, differed in no 
great degree from the world of green things surround- 
ing human life to-day. It is certain that the apple, 
pear, raspberry, blackberry, and plum were common 
fruits of the country-side in the later Stone Age, for 
seeds of all these have been found in conjunction with 
neolithic remains. Evidence of the existence of the 
beech and elm — the latter a famous pollen-yielder — 
has been discovered at a very much earlier time. All 
the conditions favourable to insect-life must have 
been present in the world ages before man appeared 
in it ; and insect-life undoubtedly existed then in a 
high state of development. It would be as unreason- 
able, therefore, not to infer that the honey-bee was 
ready on the earth with her store of sweet-food for 
man, as that man did not speedily discover that store, 
and make it an object of his daily search, just as he 
went forth daily to hunt and kill four-footed game. 

There is, of course, a great deal of difference be- 
tween a chance discovery of a wild-bee's nest, as a 
common and expected incident in a day's foraging, 
and the systematic preservation and tending of bee- 
hives as a source of daily food. While it is reasonable 
to assume that the first men used honey as an article 
of diet, it is probable that they were a wandering race, 
never halting for long in the same locality, and there- 
fore unlikely to be bee-keepers in the accepted sense 
of the word. They depended, no doubt, on the wild 
honey-stores which they happened to find in their 
entourage for the time being. But the first sign of 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

civilisation must have been the gradual lessening of 
this nomadic instinct. Tribes would come to take 
permanent possession of districts rich in the game, 
as well as the fruits and tubers, necessary for their 
daily food. At the same time the haunts of the wild 
bees would be discovered, their enemies kept down 
or driven away, the places where the swarms pitched 
annually noted, and thus the first apiary would have 
been founded, probably long before any attempt at 
cultivation of the soil or domestication of the wild 
creatures for food was made. 

Biologists generally regard hunting as the oldest 
human enterprise under the sun ; but, adopting their 
well-known method of deductive reasoning, it seems 
possible to make out a rather better case for beeman- 
ship in this category. The primaeval huntsman must 
have found much difficulty in bringing down his 
game, and still more in securing it, when maimed, 
but yet capable of eluding final capture. For this 
purpose some sort of retrieving animal, fleeter of foot 
and more cunning than its master, must have been 
even more necessary in primaeval times than it is in 
the modern days of the gun. There seems to be no 
evidence of man indicating the most elementary 
civilisation without sure signs also that he had trained 
and used some sort of dog to help him in his daily 
food-forays. But man must have existed long before 
civilisation can be said to have come within age-long 
distance of him. In these times, beset with enemies, 
he must have built his hut nest-like in some high, 
impregnable tree, out of reach of night-prowling foes ; 
and it is scarcely conceivable that the dog was his 
companion under these conditions. More probably 
he lived, for the most part, on fruits and honey-comb, 



xiv THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

and such of the small creatures as he could capture 
with his naked hands. Thus, in all likelihood, the 
first hunter was a bee-hunter. Eolithic man may 
have had his own rocky fastness or clump of hollow 
trees, where the wild bees congregated ; and with 
the coming of each summer he may have followed his 
swarms through the glades of primaeval forests as 
zealously as any bee-keeper of the present day. 

Speculation of this kind is necessarily far-fetched 
and fantastic, and can be but half seriously under- 
taken with so small and inconsiderable a creature 
as the honey-bee. But it is interesting from one 
special, and not often adopted, point of view. There 
is no more fascinating study than that of the ancient 
civilisations of the world. Egypt io,ooo years ago, 
Babylon probably still earlier, China that seems to 
have stopped at finite perfection in all ways that 
matter little, ages before the time of Abraham. But 
all these are of mushroom growth compared with the 
antiquity of bee-civilisation. It is only a tale of 
Lilliput, of a microscopic people living and moving 
on a mimic stage. Yet, perhaps tens of thousands 
of years before man had made fire, or chipped a flint 
into an axe-head, these winged nations had evolved 
a perfect plan of life, and solved social problems such 
as are only just beginning to cloud the horizon 
of human existence in the twentieth century. And 
they, and their intricate communal polity, have not 
passed away into dust, as the great human nations of 
bygone ages have done, and as those of the present 
day may be destined to do for all we can tell. 

Will a time come when we must learn from the 
honey-bee or perish ? We have still probably a 
few thousand years wherein to think it out, and 



INTRODUCTION xv 

prepare for it ; but unless the world comes to an 
end, or human increasing-and-multiplying comes to 
an end, one earth will eventually become too small 
to hold us. With this thought in mind, a study of 
the honey-bee and the arrangements of hive-life, 
takes on a new interest. Supposing that the political 
economy of a beehive may be taken as a foreshadow- 
ing of the ultimate human state, there is no denying 
that we get a glimpse into an eminently disquieting 
state of things, at least from the masculine point of 
view. We see matriarchy triumphant ; the females 
holding supreme control in the State, and not only 
initiating all rules of public conduct, but designing 
and carrying through all public works. The male is 
reduced to the one indispensable office of sex, and 
even a single exercise of this is vouchsafed only to a 
few in a thousand. But to create the large and per- 
manent army of workers necessary in a State such as 
this, and to recruit it wholly from the females, it 
became necessary to revise all rules of life from their 
very foundation. There must have been a great 
renunciation among the bees, male and female alike, 
when the resolve was made to leave the whole duty 
of procreation of their kind to one pair alone of their 
number — one pair only out of every thirty thousand 
or so — in order that the rest could devote themselves 
to ceaseless, sexually unincommoded toil. 

This may be imagined as following on a great dis- 
covery, an epoch-making discovery, changing the 
whole face and future of bee-life — how, by the nursing 
and feeding of the young grub of the female bee, she 
could be atrophied into a mere, sexless, over-intel- 
lectual labourer, or glorified into a creature lacking, 
it is true, all initiative and almost all mental power, 



xvi THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

but possessing a body capable of mothering the whole 
nation. Here is socialistic political economy carried 
to its sternest, most logical conclusions. All is sacri- 
ficed for the good of the State. The individual is 
nothing : the race is everything. " Thorough " is 
the motto of the honey-bee, and she drives every 
theory home to its last notch. Men are pleased to 
call themselves bee-masters ; but the best of them 
can do no more than study the ways of their bees, 
learn in what directions it is their will to move, and 
then try to smooth the way for them. The worker- 
bees collectively are the whole brains in the business; 
and the bee-keeper is as much the slave of the con- 
ditions and systems they have inaugurated as they 
are themselves ; while the queen-bee is the most 
willing, and, at certain seasons, the most laborious 
slave of them all. 

It is useless to deny that bee-polity, with its stern 
dead-reckoning of ingenuity, its merciless adherence 
to the demands of a system perfected through count- 
less ages, has its unpleasant and even its revolting 
aspects. Nature is always wonderful, but not always 
admirable ; and a close study of the Life within the 
Hive brings out this truth perhaps more clearly than 
with any other form of life, humanity not excepted. 
Absolute communism implies incidental cruelty : it is 
only under a system of bland political compromise, of 
neighbourly give and take, that justice and mercy 
can ever be yoke-fellows. In the republic of bees, 
nothing is allowed to persist that is harmful or useless 
to the general good. Every individual in the hive 
seems to acquiesce in this common principle — either 
by choice or compulsion — from the mother-bee down 
to the last lazy drone, born into the brief plenty of 



INTRODUCTION xvii 

waning summer days. In the height of the honey- 
flow, the State demands a storehouse filled to the 
brim ; and every bee keeps herself to the task un- 
ceasingly until death from overwork comes upon 
her, and her last load never reaches the hive. If the 
queen-bee grows old, or her powers of egg-laying 
prematurely fail, she is ruthlessly slaughtered, and 
her place filled by another specially raised by the 
workers to meet this contingency during her lifetime 
and in her full view. Drones are bred in plenty, plied 
with the richest provender in the hive, and allowed to 
wanton through their days of insatiate appetite, so 
that no young queen may go forth on her nuptial 
flight unchallenged. But when the last princess is 
happily mated, and safely home again in the warm, 
awaiting cluster, every drone is callously done to 
death, or driven out of the hive to perish. If hard 
times threaten, or the supply of stores is arrested, 
the old and worn-out members of the hive are exter- 
minated, breeding is stopped, the unborn young are 
torn from their cradle-cells and destroyed, so that 
there may be as few mouths as possible to fill in the 
lean days to come. The signs of dawning prosperity 
or adversity are watched for, and the working popu- 
lation of the hive is either increased or checked, just 
as future probabilities seem to indicate. 

But the most bewildering, most uncanny thing of 
all about this bee-republic is the fact that, in it, has 
been successfully solved the problem of the balance 
of the sexes. While all other creatures in the uni- 
verse bring forth their kind, male and female, in what 
seems a haphazard, unpremeditated way, these mys- 
terious hive-people cause their queen-mother to give 
them either sons or daughters according to the needs 



xviii THE LORE OF THE HONEY-B£E 

of the community. They lead her to the drone-cells, 
and she forthwith deposits eggs that hatch out in- 
fallibly as drones * and in the combs specially made 
wherein to rear the aborted females, the workers, the 
queen is caused to lay eggs that just as assuredly 
produce only the worker-bee. 

It is the oldest civilisation in the world, this wonder- 
ful commonwealth of the bee-people, and it is not 
unprofitable to examine it in the light of ideas which 
are at present only flickering up uncertainly on the 
distant path, but which might well broaden out some 
day into general conflagration. It is conceivable 
that a time existed when the conditions of bee-life 
were very different from those we see to-day. Bees 
have drawn together into vast communities, just as 
men are slowly, but surely, gathering into cities. A 
time may come when individual existence outside the 
city may be as impracticable for men, as life has be- 
come for separate bee-families away from the hive ; 
and then there may arise a purely masculine dilemma. 
It may be that once the magnificent drone was of real 
consequence in domestic affairs. Bee-life may have 
consisted of numberless small families, each with its 
deep-voiced, ponderous father-bee, its fruitful mother, 
and its tribe of youngsters growing up, and in time 
setting forth to establish homes for themselves. 
There is no reason why each one of the thirty or 
forty thousand pinched virgins in a hive should not 
have become a fully developed, prolific queen-bee, if 
only the right food, in sufficient quantity, had been 
given her in her larval state. But the need for the 
single large community arose. The system of a 
single national mother was instituted. The great 
renunciation was made, for good or ill. And then 



INTRODUCTION xix 

tlie trouble, from the masculine point of view, 
began. 

It must be borne in mind that, strictly speaking, 
the honey-bee does not, and never did, possess a sting. 
What is commonly known as her sting is really an 
ovipositor, and it is as such that it is almost exclu- 
sively used by the modern queen-bee in every hive 
to-day. But when the first hordes of worker-bees 
were brought into the world, reduced by the science 
of starvation to little more than sexless sinews 
and brains, they seem to have conceived a terrible 
revenge on their ancestors. The useless ovipositor 
was turned into a weapon of offence, against which 
the drone's magnificent panoply of sound and fury 
availed him nothing. Matriarchy was established at 
the point of the living sword. A pitiless logic over- 
ran everything. Intolerance of all the bright asides 
of life — the wine, the dance, the merry talk, and genial 
tarryings by the path, beloved of all drones, bee or 
human — darkened the day. And the result is only 
more honey, a vaster storehouse filled to the brim with 
never-to-be-tasted sweets, at a cost unfathomable, 
when the old larder would have sufficed for every 
real need, and life might still have been merry and 
leisurely. 

It is only a fable, far-fetched, fantastic, as any told 
to the Caliph in the " Arabian Nights.' ' But there, 
again, the woman had her way, like the bee-woman 
before, and some day she and her kind may get it 
on a more ambitious scale. And then — what of the 
sword that was once a sewing-needle ? 



" Some are content with saying that they do 
It by Instinct, and let it drop there ; but I 
believe God has given us something farther to 
do, than to invent names for things, and then 
let them drop."— A. I. Root. 



THE LORE OF THE 
HONEY-BEE 

CHAPTER I 

THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE 

" While great Csesar hurled War's lightnings by high 
Euphrates, . . . even in that season I, Virgil, nurtured in 
sweet Parthenope, went in the ways of lowly Quiet." — 
Fourth Book of the Georgics. 

IT was in Naples — the Parthenope of the Ancients 
— that the " best poem by the best poet " was 
written, nearly two thousand years ago. Essen- 
tially an apostle of the Simple Life, the cultured and 
courtly Virgil chose to live a quiet rural existence 
among his lemon-groves and his bee-hives, when 
he might have dwelt in the very focus of honour at 
the Roman capital ; where his friend and patron, 
Maecenas, the prime minister of Octavian, kept open 
house for all the great in literature and art. 

Modern bee-keepers, athirst for the Amencan- 
isation of everything, give little heed nowadays to the 
writings of one whom Bacon has called " the chastest 
poet and royalest that to the memory of man is 
known.' * And yet, if the question were asked, What 
book should first be placed in the hands of the be- 
ginner in apiculture to-day ? no wiser choice than this 
fourth book of the Georgics could be made. 



2 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

For Virgil goes direct to the great heart of the 
matter, which is the same to-day as it was two thou- 
sand years ago. The bee-keeper must be first of all 
a bee-lover, or he will never succeed ; and Virgil's 
love for his bees shines through his book from begin- 
ning to end. Of course, in a writer so deeply under 
the spell of Grecian influences, it is to be expected 
that such a work would faithfully reproduce most of 
the errors immortalised by Aristotle some three 
hundred years before. But these only serve to 
bring the real value of the book into stronger relief. 
Through the rich incrustation of poetic fancy, and 
the fragrant mythological garniture, we cannot fail 
to see the true bee-lover writing directly out of his 
own knowledge, gathered at first hand among his 
own bees. 

Virgil knew, and lovingly recorded, all that eyes 
and ears could tell him about bee-life ; and it is only 
within the last two hundred years or so that any new 
fact has been added to Virgil's store. All the writers 
on apiculture, from the earliest times down to the 
eighteenth century, have done little else than pass 
from hand to hand the fantastic errors of the ancient 
" bee-fathers/' adding generally still more fantastic 
speculations of their own. And until Schirach got 
together his little band of patient investigators of 
hive-life about a hundred years ago, Virgil's fourth 
Georgic — -considered as a practical guide to bee-keep- 
ing — was still very nearly as well-informed and up-to- 
date as any. 

It is not, however, for its technical worth that the 
book is to be recommended to the apiarian tiro of to- 
day. All that has become hopelessly old-fashioned 
with the passing of the ancient straw-skep in the last 
generation. The intrinsic value of Virgil's writings 
lies in their atmosphere of poetry and romance, which 
ought to be held inseparable, now as ever, from a craft 
which is probably the most ancient in the world. 
Almost alone among country occupations to-day, 
bee-keeping can retain much of its entrancing old- 



THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE 3 

world flavour, and yet live and thrive. But if the 
modern tendency to make the usual unlovely trans- 
atlantic thing of British honey-farming is to be 
checked, nothing will do more to that end than an 
early instillation of Virgil's beautiful philosophy. 

Dipping into this fascinating poem — with its de- 
lightful blend of carefully told fact, and rich fancy, 
and quaint garnerings from records then extant, but 
now lost in the ages — we can reconstruct for ourselves 
a picture of Virgil's country retreat near " sweet Par- 
thenope," where he loitered, and mused, and wrought 
the faultless hexameters of the Georgics with so much 
care and labour, that the work took seven years to 
accomplish — which is at the rate of less than a line 
a day. 

Virgil's house stood, probably, on the wooded slope 
above the town of Naples, deep set in orange-groves 
and lemon-plantations, and in full view, to the north, 
of the snow-pinnacled Apennines, and, southward, 
of the blue waters of the Bay. Vesuvius, too, rose 
dark against the morning sun only a few leagues 
onward; and, at its foot, the doomed cities nestled, 
Pompeii and Herculaneum, then with still a hundred 
years of busy life to run. 

Bee-hives in Virgil's day — as we can gather from 
certain ancient Roman bas-reliefs still in existence 
— were of a high, peaked, dome pattern, and they 
were made of stitched bark, or wattled osiers, as he 
himself tells us. Many of the directions he gives as 
to their situation and surroundings are still golden 
rules for every bee-keeper. The bee-garden, he says, 
must be sheltered from winds, and placed where 
neither sheep nor butting kids may trample down the 
flowers. Trees must be near for their cool shade, and 
to serve as resting-places when " the new-crowned 
kings lead out their earliest swarms in the sweet 
spring-time." He tells us to place our hives near to 
water, or where a light rivulet speeds through the 
grass ; and we are to cast into the water " large 
pebbles and willow-branches laid cross-wise, that the 



4 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

bees, when drinking, may have bridges to stand on, 
and spread their wings to the summer sun." 

Virgil's method of hiving a swarm is almost identi- 
cal with that followed by old-fashioned bee-men to 
this day. The hive is to be scoured with crushed 
balm and honey wort, and then you are to " make a 
tinkling round about, and clash the cymbals of the 
Mother " — that is, of the goddess Cybele. The bees 
will forthwith descend, he tells us, and occupy the 
prepared nest. When the honey-harvest is taken, 
you are first to sprinkle your garments and cleanse 
your breath with pure water, and then to approach 
the hives " holding forth pursuing smoke in your 
hand." And the old-time bee-man of to-da^/ takes 
his mug of small-beer as a necessary rite, and washes 
himself before handling his hives. 

But perhaps the great charm of the fourth Georgic 
consists, not in its nearness to truth about bee-life, 
but in the continual reference to the beautiful myths, 
and hardly less attractive errors, of immemorial times, 
copied so faithfully by mediaeval writers, but not apt 
to be heard of by the learner of to-day unless he reads 
the old books. 

Virgil begins his poem by speaking of " heaven- 
born honey, the gift of air," in allusion to the belief 
that the nectar in flowers was not a secretion of the 
plant itself, but fell like manna from the skies. He 
seriously warns his readers of the disastrous effect of 
echoes on the denizens of a hive, and of the hurtful 
nature of burnt crab-shells ; and tells us that in 
windy weather bees will carry about little pebbles 
as counterpoises, " as ships take in sand-ballast when 
they roll deep in the tossing surge." 

He was a firm believer in the Divine origin of bees. 
To all the ancients the honey-bee was a perpetual 
miracle, as much a sign and token of an omnipotent 
Will, set in the flowery meadows, as is the rainbow, to 
modern pietists, set in the sky. While all other crea- 
tures in the universe were seen to produce their kind 
by coition of the sexes, these mysterious winged 



THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE 5 

people seemed to be exempt from the common law. 
Virgil, copying from much older writers, says : " they 
neither rejoice in bodily union, nor waste themselves 
in love's languors, nor bring forth their young by pain 
of birth ; but alone from the leaves and sweet-scented 
herbage they gather their children in their mouths, 
thus sustaining their strength of tiny citizens.' ' 

Just as marvellous, however — at least to the modern 
entomologist — will appear the belief, widespread 
among the ancients, and shared by Virgil, that swarms 
of bees can be spontaneously generated from the de- 
caying carcass of an ox. Virgil professes to derive 
his account of the matter from an old Egyptian legend, 
and he gives careful directions to bee-keepers of what 
he seems never to doubt is an excellent method for 
stocking an apiary. There is a very old translation 
of the passage in the fourth book of the Georgics re- 
lating to these self -generated bees, which is worth 
quoting, if only on account of its quaint mediaeval 
savour. " First, there is found a place, small and 
narrowed for the very use, shut in by a leetle tiled 
roof and closed walles, through which the light comes 
in askant through four windowes, facing the four 
pointes of the compass. Next is found a two-year-old 
bull-calf, whose crooked horns bee just beginning to 
bud ; the beast his nose-holes and breathing are 
stopped, in spite of his much kicking ; and after he 
hath been thumped to death, his entrails, bruised as 
they bee, melt inside his entire skinne. This done, 
he is left in the place afore-prepared, and under his 
sides are put bitts of boughes, and thyme, and fresh- 
plucked rosemarie. And all this doethe take place 
at the season when the zephyrs are first curling the 
waters, before the meades bee ruddy with their 
spring-tide colours, and before the swallow, that leetle 
chatterer, doethe hang her nest again the beam. In 
time, the warm humour beginneth to ferment inside 
the soft bones of the carcase ; and wonderful to tell, 
there appear creatures, footless at first, but which 
soon getting unto themselves winges, mingle together 



6 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

and buzz about, joying more and more in their airy 
life. At last, burst they forth, thick as rain-droppes 
from a summer cloude, thick as arrowes, the which 
leave the clanging stringes when the nimble Parthians 
make their first battle onset." 

For a study in the persistence of delusions, this 
affords us some very promising material. In the first 
place, the generation of bees from putrescent matter 
is, and must always have been, an impossibility. 
If there is one thing that the honey-bee abhors 
more than another, it is carrion of any descrip- 
tion. Indeed, putrid odours will often induce a stock 
of bees to forsake its hive altogether ; so it cannot 
even be supposed that bees would venture near the 
scene of Virgil's malodorous experiment, and thus 
give rise to the belief that they were nurtured there. 
But not only was this practice a recognised and es- 
tablished thing in Virgil's time, but entire credence 
was placed in it throughout the Middle Ages down, 
in fact, to so late a time as the seventeenth century. 
It is on record that the experiment was carried 
through with complete success by a certain Mr. Carew, 
of Anthony, in Cornwall, at an even later date still. 

The practice, moreover, was of infinitely greater 
antiquity than even Virgil supposed. He was pro- 
bably right in giving it an Egyptian origin, and this 
alone may date it back thousands of years. In Egypt 
the custom had a curious variant. The ox was placed 
underground, with its horns above the surface of the 
soil. Then, when the process of generation was pre- 
sumed to be complete, the tips of the horns were 
sawn off, and the bees are said to have issued from 
them, as out of two funnels. 

Nearly all the ancient writers, with the exception 
of Aristotle, mention the practice in some form or 
other. Varro, writing half a century before Virgil, 
says, " it is from rotten oxen that are born the sweet 
bees, the mothers of honey/' Ovid gives the story 
of the Egyptian shepherd Aristaeus as enlarged upon 
by Virgil, and adds some speculations of his own. 



THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE 7 

He suggests that the soul of the ox is converted into 
numberless bee-souls as a punishment to the ox for 
his lifelong depredations amongst the flowers and 
herbage, tne bee being a creature that can only do 
good to, and cannot injure, vegetation. 

Manifestly, where there is so general, and so widely 
independent a corroboration of a story, some ex- 
planation must exist, which will alike bear out the 
truth and condone, or at least extenuate, the error. 
A careful examination of the various accounts of bee- 
swarms having been produced from decaying animal 
matter reveals one common omission in regard to 
them. All the writers are agreed that dense clouds 
of bee-like insects are evolved ; and speak of these 
as escaping into the air and flying off, presumably in 
the immediate quest of honey. But no one bears testi- 
mony to honey having been actually gathered by these 
insects, nor is it recorded that they were ever induced 
to take possession of a hive, as ordinary swarms of 
bees will readily do. They are spoken of more as 
enriching the neighbourhood generally, by augment- 
ing the number of bees abroad, than as conducing 
to the well-being of any particular bee-owner. 

Herein, no doubt, is to be found a clue to the whole 
mystery. If it was not the honey-bee — the Apis 
mellifica of modern naturalists — which was generated 
from the entombed body of Virgil's unfortunate bull- 
calf, what other insect, closely resembling a bee, could 
have been produced under those conditions ? The 
answer has been readily given by several naturalists 
of our own time. There is a fly, called the drone- 
fly, which exactly meets the difficulty. He is so 
like the ordinary honey-bee that on one occasion, 
and that recently, he was mistaken for the genuine 
insect by one calling himself a bee-expert, and holding 
a diploma ofiiciaily entitling him to the use of that 
name. This drone-fly would have behaved almost 
exactly as Virgil's calf-bred bees are said to have 
behaved, and according to the various descriptions of 
the matter given by other writers living before and 



8 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

since. He would issue forth in a dense cloud im- 
mediately his natal prison-doors were opened, and 
he would comport himself in other ways exactly as 
enumerated . Finally, he would beget himself j oyously 
to the open country, as a swarm of bees would do ; 
and once more the Virgilian theory of bee-production 
would meet with its seeming verification. 

But having gone thus far with the drone-fly, it is 
difficult to resist going a little farther. We cannot 
leave him in the ignominious company of slaughtered 
oxen, but must give him his due of more lordly asso- 
ciations. " Out of the eater came forth meat, and 
out of the strong came forth sweetness/ ' When 
Samson went down to Timnath on his fateful mission 
of wooing, and saw the carcass by the way beset with 
a cloud of insects, we need not cast any doubt on his 
genuine belief that they were honey-bees. He pro- 
pounded his riddle in all good faith, and the form of 
it can very well be explained as a not undue stretch 
of allowable poetic privilege. But that the creatures 
he saw hovering about the dead lion were really bees, 
and that Samson actually obtained honey from the 
carcass, is not to be accepted without the exercise of 
a faith that is undistinguishable from credulity. 
Many attempts have been made to explain away the 
difficulties of the problem on natural lines, but they 
are all alike unconvincing. There is little doubt 
at this time that the part of the story dealing with 
the honey is nothing but a deft embroidering on the 
original legend by some later chronicler ; and that 
the insects which were seen about the dead lion were 
really drone-flies generated in the same fashion as 
those from Virgil's ox. 

Perhaps no better general idea is to be obtained of 
the condition of bee-knowledge among the ancients 
than from the writings of Pliny, the Elder, who was 
born in a.d. 23. He, too, deals with the ox-born bees ; 
but the reader's interest will centre for the most part 
in Pliny's grave and careful account of the life and 
customs of the honey-bee, as commonly accepted 



THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE 9 

among his contemporaries. Very few indeed of the 
facts he so picturesquely details have any real founda- 
tion in truth. Like nearly all the classic writers, he 
had little more accurate knowledge of the life within 
the hive than we have of the bottom of the Pacific 
Ocean. But he made up for this deficiency, as did all 
others of his time, by dipping largely into the stores 
of his own fancy as well as those of other people. 

His account of the origin and nature of honey is 
quaintly pleasant reading. " Honey," he says, " is 
engendered from the air, mostly at the rising of the 
constellations, and more especially when Sirius is 
shining ; never, however, before the rising of the 
Vergiliae, and then just before day-break. . . . 
Whether it is that this liquid is the sweat of the 
heavens, or whether a saliva emanating from the stars 
or a juice exuding from the air while purifying itself — 
would that it had been, when it comes to us, pure, 
limpid, and genuine, as it was when first it took its 
downward descent. But, as it is, falling from so 
vast a height, attracting corruption in its passage, 
and tainted by the exhalations of the earth as it 
meets them ; sucked, too, as it is, from off the trees 
and the herbage of the fields, and accumulated in the 
stomachs of the bees, for they cast it up again through 
the mouth ; deteriorated besides by the juices of 
flowers, and then steeped within the hives and sub- 
jected to such repeated changes : — still, in spite of 
all this, it affords us by its flavour a most exquisite 
pleasure, the result, no doubt, of its asthereal nature 
and origin.' ' 

Modern bee-keepers ascribe the varying quality 
in honey nowadays to the prevalence of good or bad 
nectar-producing crops during the time of its gather- 
ing, or to its admixture with that bane of the apicul- 
turist — the detestable honey-dew. But Pliny set this 
down entirely to the influence of the stars. When 
certain constellations were in the ascendant, bad 
honey resulted, because their exudations were inferior. 
Honey collected after the rising of Sirius — the famous 



io THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

honey-star of all the ancient writers — was invariably 
of good quality. But when Sirius ruled the skies in 
conjunction with the rising of Venus, Jupiter, or 
Mercury, honey was not honey at all, but a sort of 
heavenly nostrum or medicament, which not only 
had the power to cure diseases of the eyes and bowels, 
and ameliorate ulcers, but actually could restore the 
dead to life. Similar virtues were possessed by 
honey gathered after the appearance of a rainbow, 
provided — as Pliny is careful to warn us — that no 
rain intervenes between the rainbow and the time 
of the bees' foraging. 

On the life-history of the honey-bee Pliny wrote 
voluminously. He tells us of a nation of industrious 
creatures ruled over by a king, distinguished by a 
white spot on his forehead like a diadem. These 
king-bees were of three sorts- — red, black, and mottled ; 
but the red were superior to all the rest. He appears 
to accept, though guardedly, the old legend that 
sexual intercourse among bees was divinely abrogated 
in favour of a system of procreation originating in 
the flowers. He mentions a current belief — which 
must have been the boldest of heresies at the time- 
that the king-bee is the only male, all the rest being 
females. The existence of the drones he explains 
away very ingeniously. " They would seem/ 1 he 
says, " to be a kind of imperfect bee, formed the 
very last of all ; the expiring effort, as it were, of 
worn-out and exhausted old age, a late and tardy 
offspring." 

The discipline in the hives was, according to Pliny, 
a very rigid affair. Early in the morning the whole 
population was awakened by one bee sounding a 
clarion. The day's work was carried through on 
strict military lines, and at evening the king's bugler 
was again to be observed flying about the hive, utter- 
ing the same shrill fanfaronade by which the colony 
was roused at daybreak. After this note was heard, 
all work ceased for the day, and the hive became 
immediately silent. 



THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE n 

His book abounds in curious details as to hive- 
life. When foraging bees are overtaken in their 
expeditions by nightfall, they place themselves on 
their backs on the ground, to protect their wings 
from the dew, thus lying and watching until the 
first sign of dawn, when they return to the colony. 
At swarming-time, the king-bee does not fly, but 
is carried out by his attendants. Pliny warns in- 
tending bee-keepers not to place their hives within 
sound of an echo, this being very injurious to the 
bees ; but, he adds, the clapping of hands and tink- 
ling of brass afford bees especial delight. He ascribes 
to them an astonishing longevity, some living as 
long as seven years. But the hives must be placed 
out of the reach of frogs, who, it seems, were fond of 
breathing into hives, this causing great mortality 
among their occupants. When bees need artificial 
food, they are to be supplied with raisins or dried figs 
beaten to a pulp, carded wool steeped in wine, 
hydromel, or the raw flesh of poultry. Wax, Pliny 
says, is best clarified by first boiling it in sea-water, 
and then drying it in the light of the moon, for white- 
ness. And in taking honey from the hives, a person 
must be well washed and clean. Malefactors are 
cautioned against approaching a hive of bees at any 
time. Bees, he assures us, have a particular aversion 
to a thief. 

To the latter-day practical bee-keeper, all these 
minute details given by the classic writers read very 
like useless and cumbersome nonsense ; and it seems 
matter for wonder that the bees contrived to exist 
at all under such ingeniously complicated mismanage- 
ment, born, as it was, of an ignorance flawed by 
scarcely a single ascertained fact. But the truth 
stands out pretty clearly that bee-keeping two 
thousand years ago was really a very large and impor- 
tant industry. One apiary is mentioned by Varro 
as yielding five thousand pounds of honey yearly, 
while the annual produce of another brought in a 
sum of ten thousand sesterces. Pliny mentions the 



12 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

islands of Crete and Cyprus, and the coast-country 
of Africa, as producing honey in great abundance. 
Sicily was famous for the good quality of its beeswax, 
but Corsica seems to have been one of the main sources 
of this. When the island was subject to the Romans, 
it is said that a tribute of two hundred thousand 
pounds' weight of wax was yearly exacted from it. 
This, however, is such an astounc^ng figure that it 
must be taken with a certain cautifc. 

Evidently the bees in the ancient world managed 
their business in fairly good fashion, in spite of the 
ignorance of their masters, or at least of the ancient 
chroniclers de re rustica. But it should always be 
borne in mind that the writers on husbandry and 
kindred subjects were seldom practical men. With 
the single exception, perhaps, of Virgil's '.' Georgicon," 
these old books relating to apiculture bear unmistak- 
able evidence of being, for the most part, merely 
compilations from writings still more ancient, or 
heterogeneous gatherings together of hearsays and 
current fables of the time. It is certain that the 
men who were actually engaged in the craft of bee- 
keeping, and who knew most about it, wrote nothing 
at all. Probably they concerned themselves very 
little with the myths and fables of bee-craft, and owed 
their success to hard, practical, everyday experience, 
which is the surest, and perhaps the only, guide 
to-day. 



CHAPTER II , 

THE ISLE OF HONEY 

IF we are to accept all that the old Roman 
historians have put on record to the glory of 
their race, we must believe that their conquering 
legions found everywhere barbarism, and left in its 
place the seeds of a high civilisation — high, at least, 



THE ISLE OF HONEY 13 

in the general acceptance of the word in those lurid, 
moving days. 

But it may well be questioned whether the Britain 
that Caesar first knew was as barbaric as it has been 
painted. We are accustomed to look upon Caesar's 
account of his earliest view of Albion — of Eilanban, 
the White Island, as the Britons themselves called 
it — as the first glance vouchsafed to us into the history 
of our own land. * But this is very far from being the 
truth. British history begins with the record of the 
first voyage of the Phoenicians, who, adventuring 
farther than any other of their intrepid race, chanced 
upon the Scilly Isles and the neighbouring coast of 
Cornwall, and thence brought back their first cargo 
of tin. 

And how long ago this is, who shall say ? The 
whereabouts of the Phoenician Barat - Anac, the 
Country of Tin, remained a secret probably for ages, 
jealously guarded by these ancient mariners, the 
first true seamen that the world had ever known. 
They were expert navigators, venturing enormous 
distances oversea, even in King Solomon's time ; 
and that was a thousand years before the advent 
of Caesar. In all likelihood they had been in fre- 
quent communication with the Britons centuries 
before the Greeks took to searching for this wonder- 
ful tin-bearing land, and still longer before the name 
Barat-Anac became corrupted into the Britannia 
of the Romans, And it is hardly to be supposed 
that a people of so ancient a civilisation, and of so 
great a repute in the sciences and refinements of life, 
as the Phoenicians — a people from whom the early 
Greeks themselves had learned the art and practice 
of letters — could remain in touch, century after 
century, with a nation like the Britons without affect- 
ing in them enormous improvement and development 
in every way that would appeal to so high-mettled 
and competent a race. 

For high-mettled and capable the Britons were, 
even in those old; dim, far-off days. Caesar's 

B 



14 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

account of them, read between the lines, accords ill 
with the commonly accepted notion of a horde of 
savages, pigging together in reed hovels, and daub- 
ing their naked bodies blue to strike terror into the 
equally savage minds of their island adversaries. 
We get a glimpse of a people much farther advanced 
in the arts of peace and war. In all probability they 
clothed themselves at ordinary times, picturesquely 
enough, in the furs of the wild animals, with which 
the island abounded ; and it was only in war-time 
that they stripped and painted. Old prints have 
familiarised us with the sight of the sailors of Drake 
and Nelson stripped much in the same way ; and the 
blue paint of Druidieal times is not divided by so 
great a gulf as the ages warrant from the scarlet cloth 
and glittering brass - ware of nineteenth - century 
fighting - men. As armourers the ancient Britons 
must have been not immeasurably inferior to the 
Romans, and we are told that they excelled in at 
least one difficult craft, the making of all sorts of 
basket-ware. 

But there is other testimony, apart from Caesar's, 
in favour of the view that they were b}>- no means 
a barbarous people. Diodorus Siculus, who was 
Caesar's contemporary, speaks of them as possessing 
an integrity of character even superior to that 
commonly obtaining among the Romans ; and 
Tacitus, writing about a century later, ascribes to 
them great alertness of apprehension, as well as 
high mental capacity. Protected as they were by 
the sea, it is probable that war entered to no large 
extent into their lives, and they were essentially 
a pastoral people. The cultured and daring 
Phoenician traders are certain to have prospected 
the coast much farther eastward than is recorded, 
and thus to have materially hastened British ad- 
vance in civilisation— at least, as far as the southern 
tribes were concerned. 

It has been claimed — on what evidence it is 
difficult to determine — that the Romans, besides 



THE ISLE OF HONEY 15 

teaching the Britons all other arts of manufacture and 
husbandry, introduced the practice of bee-culture 
into the conquered isles. But Pliny, giving an ac- 
count of the voyages of Pytheas, which are supposed 
to have been undertaken some three hundred years 
before Caesar ever set foot here, mentions the Ge- 
ographer of Marseilles as landing in Britain, and 
finding the people brewing a drink from wheat and 
honey. There is, however, another source of testi- 
mony on this point, of infinitely greater antiquity 
than any yet enumerated. Long before the Phoeni- 
cian sailors discovered their tin-country, there were 
bards in Eilanban — the White Island — hymning the 
prowess of their Celtic heroes and the traditional 
doings of their race. These old wild songs were 
handed down from singer to singer through the ages, 
and many of them, still extant among the records of 
the Welsh bards, must be of unfathomable antiquity. 
These profess to describe the state of Britain from 
the very earliest beginnings of the human race. And 
in some of them, which are seemingly among the 
oldest, Britain is called the Isle of Honey, because 
of the abundance of wild bees everywhere in the 
primaeval woods. There would be little profit, and 
no little folly, in seeking to invest these old 
traditions with any more than their due significance. 
But there is much in the name. And it may be 
conjectured that if Britain was known among the 
early Druidical bards as the Isle of Honey the natural 
conditions giving rise to the name were still prevalent, 
and reflected immemorially in the life of the people, 
when Caesar first saw them crowding the white cliffs 
above him, a huge-limbed, ruddy-locked, war-like 
race. He records that they possessed their herds of 
tame cattle and their cultivated fields ; and it is 
reasonable to suppose that the hives of wattled osier 
that Virgil wrote of a century later had their ancient 
counterpart of woven basket hives in the British 
villages of the day. 

No doubt the Romans, during their second and 



16 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

permanent occupation, which did not take place 
until a hundred years after, taught the Britons their 
own methods of bee-management, and improved in 
numberless ways on the practice of the craft, which, 
among the British, was probably a very simple and 
rough-and-ready affair. But it was not until the 
Romans had gone, and the Anglo-Saxon rule was 
fairly established in the Island, that bee-keeping 
seems to have become one of the recognised national 
industries. The records bearing on the social life of 
the people at that time are necessarily broken and 
scanty ; but it is certain that honey, with its pro- 
ducts, had become an important article of diet among 
ail classes, high and low. It is difficult — here in the 
present time, when cane and beet-sugar, and even 
chemical sweetening agents, are in constant and 
universal use — to realise that, from the remotest 
times down to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 
there was practically no other sweet-food of any 
description, except honey, in the world ; and to 
estimate, therefore, what a prominent place in the 
industries of each country bee-keeping must then 
have occupied. There was nothing else but honey 
for all purposes, and it is constantly mentioned in 
the old monkish chronicles and the curious manu- 
script cookery-books that have survived from the 
Middle Ages. 

It is true that the sugar-cane was known as far 
back as the first century a.d. Strabo, writing just 
before the commencement of the Christian Era, 
relates how Nearchus, who was Admiral of the Fleet 
to Alexander the Great, made an important voyage 
of discovery in the Indian Ocean, and brought back 
news of the wonderful " honey-bearing reed," which 
he found in use among the natives of India. There 
is a record that the Spaniards brought the sugar- 
cane from the East, and planted it in Madeira early 
in the fifteenth century. Thence its cultivation 
spread to the West Indies and South America, dur- 
ing that and the following century. Throughout the 



THE ISLE OF HONEY 17 

Middle Ages it was in very restricted use among the 
richest and noblest families in Europe, Venice being 
then the centre of its distribution. But cane-sugar 
was little else than a costly luxury of diet, or a 
vehicle in medicine, even among the highest in the 
land, until well into the seventeenth century, when 
it slowly began to oust honey from the popular 
favour. The chances are, however, that the middle 
and lower classes of England possessed, and could 
afford, no other sweetening agent but honey, for any 
purpose, down to about three hundred years ago. 

Among the Anglo-Saxons the beehives supplied 
the whole nation, from the King down to the poorest 
serf, not only with an important part of their food, 
but with drink and light as well. We read of mead 
being served at all the royal banquets, and in common 
use in every monastery. Even in those far-off days 
there were wayside taverns where drink was retailed 
and the chief potion was mead, although a kind of ale 
was also brewed. No priest was allowed to enter 
these hostelries, but this could scarcely have been a 
great deprivation, as the home allowance of mead 
was a sufficiently generous one. Ethelwold's allow- 
ance to each half-dozen of his monks at dinner was a 
sextarium of mead, which, in modern measure, would 
be probably several gallons. 

There were three kinds of liquor brewed from honey 
in Anglo - Saxon times. The commonest, or mead 
proper, which may be taken as the usual drink of the 
masses, was made by steeping in water the crushed 
refuse of the combs after the honey had been pressed 
from them. This would be strained and set aside in 
earthern vessels until it fermented and became mead. 
And the longer it was kept, the more potent grew the 
liquor. Another kind, made from honey, water, and 
the juice of mulberries, was called Morat ; and this, 
presumably, was the beverage of the more well-to-do. 
A third concoction, known as Pigment, was brewed 
from the purest honey, flavoured with spices of differ- 
ent sorts, and received an additional lacing of some 



18 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

kind of wine. Probably this was the mead served at 
the royal table. The office of King's Cup-bearer 
could have been no sinecure in those days, for it was 
the custom of Anglo-Saxon monarchs to entertain 
their courtiers at four banquets daily, and the quanti- 
ties of liquor which the old records tell us were con- 
sumed on these occasions seem incredible, even in the 
annals of such a deep-drinking race. Not the least 
valuable outcome of the Norman Conquest, as far as 
the national temperance was concerned, must have 
been the reform instituted in these Court orgies by 
William the First, who reduced their number to a 
single state banquet daily. 

If it may be supposed that the reign of Harold 
marked the summit of popularity for our good old 
English honey-brew, it is equally certain that with the 
coming of the Normans began its slow deiine in the 
national estimation. Following in the trail of Duke 
William's nondescript army came the traders, with 
their outlandish liquors from the grape ; and wine 
must soon have taken the place of the Saxon mead, 
first among the foreign nobles, and later among the 
native thanes. From that day mead has steadily de- 
clined in vogue, and to-day mead making is practically 
a lost art, surviving only among a few old-fashioned 
folk here and there in remote country places. 

But it is still to be obtained ; and those of us who 
have had the good fortune to taste good old mead, 
well matured in the wood, are sure to feel a regret that 
no determined effort is being made to rehabilitate it 
in the national favour. Perhaps there is no more 
wholesome drink in the world, and certainly none re- 
quiring less technical skill in the making. All the 
ancient books on bee-keeping give receipts for its 
manufacture, differing only in the variety of foreign 
ingredients added for its improvement, or, as we 
prefer to believe, to its degradation. For the finest 
mead can be brewed from pure honey and water alone, 
and any addition of spices or other matter serves only 
to destroy its unique flavour. Some of the sixteenth 



BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 19 

and seventeenth century bee-masters were renowned 
in their day for their mead-brewing ; and one of the 
foremost of them claims for his potion that it was ab- 
solutely indistinguishable, by the most competent 
judges, from old Canary Sack. He gives careful 
directions for the manufacture of his mead ; and these 
can be, and have, indeed, recently been, followed with 
complete success. This mead, when kept for a num- 
ber of years, froths into the glass like champagne, 
but stills at once, leaving the glass lined with spark- 
ling air-bells. It is of a pale golden colour, and has a 
bouquet something like old cider ; but its flavour is 
hardly to be compared with any known liquor of the 
present time. It is interesting, however, to have its 
originator's authority for its close resemblance to 
Canary Sack, as this gives a clue to the intrinsic 
qualities of a wine long since passed out of the popular 
ken. 



CHAPTER III 

BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 

STUDENTS of old books on the honey-bee are 
generally struck with two very remarkable 
characteristics about them — their invariable fine 
old classic and romantic flavour, and their ingenious 
leavening of a great mass of quite obvious fable by 
a very small modicum of enduring fact. 

It is difficult to realise, until one has delved deep 
into these curious old records, how completely they 
are dyed through and through with the picturesque, 
but mainly erroneous, ideas of the ancient classic 
bee-fathers. The writers were, almost without ex- 
ception, earnest, practical men, whose chief interest 
in life was the study and pursuit of their craft. 
But they seem, one and all, to have laboured under 



20 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

the idea that it was their bounden duty to uphold 
everything written about bees by the old Greek and 
Roman Utter ati t and that it would be the rankest 
heresy to advance any new truth, garnered from their 
individual experience, unless it could be supported 
by ample testimony from the same infallible source. 

They seemed to look upon the works of Aristotle, 
Virgil, Pliny, and the rest, as so many divine revela- 
tions of the mystery of bee-craft, all-sufficing, finitely 
perfect ; and they continually quoted from them in 
support of their own contentions, or in refutation of 
the statements of others, much as teachers of religion 
refer doubters to Bible texts. The bee-masters of the 
Middle Ages were, however, not alone in adopting 
this peculiar attitude of mind. It seems to have been 
the prevailing habit of the time with all classes. One 
might almost be justified in concluding that the study 
of nature in those days had no other object with these 
inveterate old classicians but to support what had 
already been set down by their revered oracles. It 
was enough that a thing had been written in Greek 
or Latin in the literary youth of the world ; it was 
immaculate — the first and last word on the question ; 
and if their personal observations seemed at variance 
with any statement of the old-world writers, then the 
contradiction was only an apparent one, and could, 
no doubt, be easily resolved by a more learned ex- 
ponent of these bee-scriptures of ancient days. 

It is certainly, at first glance, a matter for wonder 
that men could pass their whole lives in the pursuit 
of the craft, and yet manage to preserve uncorrupted a 
faith which seems so readily, and at so many points, 
assailable. But it must be remembered that any 
observation of the inner life of the honey-bee was 
then an extremely difficult thing. It was next to im- 
possible to see anything that was going on inside the 
hives in use at that day. Pliny mentions a hive 
made of what he calls mirror-stone, which was 
probably talc, and through the transparent sides of 
which the working of the bees could be seen. But 



BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 21 

nothing of the kind seems to have been attempted 
among English bee-masters until the seventeenth 
century. Moreover, even if the whole hive had been 
made of clear glass, the observer would have been 
very little the wiser. He would have had the outer 
sides of the two end combs in view, and he would have 
seen much coming and going among the bees, with 
an occasional glimpse of the queen. But all the 
wonderful activity of the hive, so laboriously ascer- 
tained by latter-day observers, with the help of so 
many ingenious appliances, goes on entirely in the 
hidden recesses of the combs ; and any attempt to 
study this life under the conditions appertaining in 
the Middle Ages would have been manifestly futile. 
It was not until Huber's leaf-hive was invented — when 
it became to some extent possible to divide the combs 
for a short time without hopelessly disturbing the 
bees — that any real progress in bee-knowledge was 
made. The modern observation-hive, wherein the 
bees are compelled to build their combs between glass 
partitions, one over the other instead of side by side, 
was a still greater advance, and rendered the whole 
interior of the bee-dwelling available for study. But 
it is open to objection that bee-life in such a contri- 
vance is carried on under too artificial conditions. In 
a natural bee-nest, the combs are built roughly side 
by side, and the brood is reared in the centre area 
of each comb, the surface covered by the breeding- 
cells diminishing outwards in each direction. Thus 
the brood-nest takes a globular form, with the 
honey-stores above and around it ; and this natural 
arrangement is inevitably destroyed in a hive 
where the combs are superimposed and not col- 
lateral. 

In the face, therefore, of the practical impossibility 
of learning anything about bees when they were 
housed in the usual straw-skep, the old bee-masters 
confined themselves to a repetition of the beliefs of 
the ancient writers, deftly interwoven with specula- 
tions of their own, which, as no one was in a position 



22 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

to refute them, were advanced with all the more 
daring and assurance. 

They seem to have been, in the main, agreed on the 
point that the ordinary generative principle, other- 
wise universal throughout creation, was miraculously 
dispensed with in the single case of the honey-bee. 
Moses Rusden, who was Bee-Master to King Charles 
the Second, and who published his " Further Dis- 
covery of Bees " so late as the year 1679, believed 
that the worker-bees gathered from the flowers not 
only the germs of life, but the actual corporeal sub- 
stance, of the young bees. 

He pointed triumphantly to the little ; globular 
lumps of many-coloured pollen which bees so in- 
dustriously fetch into the hives during the breeding- 
season, and asserted that these were the actual bodily 
matter from which the young bees developed. He 
also maintained that every hive was ruled over by a 
king, but here Rusden was evidently trying to serve 
two masters. No doubt he was a true " Abhorrer, 14 
and heartily detested anything at variance with the 
doctrine of the divine right of monarchs. He had 
faithfully copied from Virgil as to the gathering of 
this generative substance from the flowers ; but he 
felt that, as the King's Bee-Master, it was incumbent 
on him to put in a good word for the restored mon- 
archy if he could. There were still many in the realm 
who were altogether opposed to the Restoration, and 
probably more who were waverers between the faiths. 
And Rusden, doubtless, saw that if he could point to 
any parallel instance in Nature where the system of 
monarchy was the divinely ordained state, he would 
be furnishing his patron with a magnificent argument 
in favour of his kingship, and one, moreover, which 
would especially appeal to the ignorant and super- 
stitious masses. No doubt, however, in taking up 
this position, Rusden was only echoing the belief 
immemorially established among the beemen of the 
past. 

The single large bee, which all knew to exist in each 



BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 23 

hive, was generally looked upon as the absolute ruler 
of the community. It is variously described as a king 
or queen by writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries, but only in the sense of a governor ; and the 
word chosen largely depended on the sex of the august 
person who happened to occupy the English throne at 
the time. Thus Rusden very wisely discarded the 
notion of a queen-bee when he had to deal with Charles 
the Second. Butler, perhaps the most learned of 
the mediaeval writers on the honey-bee, as astutely 
forbore to mention the word king, his book being 
published in the reign of Queen Anne. He calls it 

The Feminine Monarchic/ ' but seems to have no 
more suspected the truth that the large bee was really 
the mother of the whole colony than any of his pre- 
decessors. Almost alone in his day, however, he 
refuses to accept the flower theory of bee-generation, 
and asserts that the worker-bees and drones are the 
females and males respectively. But, he says, they 
" engender not as other living creatures ; onely they 
surfer their Drones among them for a season, by whose 
Masculine virtue they strangely conceive and breed 
for the preservation of their sweet kinde." He gets 
over the difficulty of there being no drones in the hive 
for nine months in the year, during part of which time 
breeding goes actively forward, by asserting that the 
worker-bees immaculately conceive of the drones for 
the season, their summer impregnation sufficing until 
the drones reappear in the May of the following year. 
Thus, without guessing it, he was very near the dis- 
covery of one of the most astounding facts in Nature 
— that the queen-bee of a hive, after a single traffic 
with a drone, continues to produce fertile eggs for the 
rest of her life, which may extend to as long as three, 
or even four, years. 

Butler's book is rich in the quaint bee-lore of his 
times. He tells us the queen-bee has under her 
M subordinate Gouvernours and Leaders. For differ- 
ence from the rest they beare for their crest a tuft or 
tossel, in some coloured yellow, in some murrey, in 



24 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

manner of a plume ; whereof some turne downward 
like an Ostrich-feather, others stand upright like a 
Hern-top. In less than a quarter of an hour/* he 
assures us, " you may see three or foure of them come 
forth of a good stall ; but chiefly in Gemini, before 
their continuall labour have worne these ornaments/ * 
And any warm spring or summer morning, if you 
watch a hive of bees at work, you may chance upon 
much the same thing. In some flowers, notably the 
evening primrose, the pollen-grains have a way of 
clinging together in threads ; and these festoons often 
catch in the antennae of the foraging bees, giving 
much the same appearance of a plume, or tassel, as 
Butler saw in his day. 

He gives some advice as to the deportment of a 
good bee-master which is well worth quoting. "If 
thou wilt have the favour of thy Bees that they sting 
thee not, thou must avoid such things as offend them : 
thou must not be unchaste or uncleanely : for im- 
purity and sluttishnesse (themselves being most 
chaste and neat) they utterly abhore : thou must not 
come among them smelling of sweat, or having a 
stinking breath, caused either through eating of 
Leekes, Onions, Garleeke, and the like ; or by any 
other meanes : the noisomenesse whereof is corrected 
with a cup of Beere : and therefore it is not good to 
come among them before you have drunke : thou 
must not be given to surfeiting and drunkennesse : 
thou must not come puffing and blowing unto them, 
neither hastily stir among them, nor violently defend 
thy self e when they seeme to threaten thee ; but softly 
moving thy hand before thy face, gently putting 
them by : and lastly, thou must be no Stranger unto 
them, In a word, thou must be chaste, cleanly, 
sweet, sober, quiet, and familiar : so will they love 
thee, and know thee from all other." Thus, the good 
bee-master, according to Butler, is necessarily a com- 
pendium of all the virtues ; and nothing more seems 
to be wanted to bring about the millennium than to 
vnduce all mankind to become keepers of bees. 



BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 25 

Writers on the honey-bee in mediaeval times vied 
with each other in their testimony to the extra- 
ordinary powers and intelligence of their hive-people. 
But perhaps a story, gravely related by Butler, out- 
does them all. He prefaces it by declaring that 
" Bees are so wise and skilful, as not onely to discrie 
a certaine little God amightie, though he came among 
them in the likenesse of a Wafer-cake ; but also to 
build him an artificial chappell. ,, He goes on to 
relate that " a certaine simple woman, having some 
stals of Bees that yeelded not unto hir hir desired 
profit, but did consume and die of the murraine ; 
made hir mone to an other Woman more simple than 
hir selfe ; who gave her counsell to get a consecrated 
Host, and put it among them. According to whose 
advice she went to the priest to receive the host : 
which when she had done, she kept it in hir mouth, 
and being come home againe she took it out, and put 
it into one of hir hives. Whereupon the murraine 
ceased, and the Honie abounded. The Woman, there- 
fore, lifting up the Hive at the due time to take out 
the Honie, saw there (most strange to be seene) a 
Chappell built by the Bees, with an altar in it, the 
wals adorned by marvellous skill of Architecture, 
with windowes conveniently set in their places : also 
a doore and a steeple with bells. And the Host 
being laid upon the altar, the Bees making a sweet 
noise, flew around it." 

This story is only paralleled by another, equally 
ancient, wherein it is related that some thieves broke 
into a church, and stole the silver casket in which the 
holy wafers were kept. They found one wafer in the 
box, and this they hid under a hive before making ofi 
with the more intrinsically valuable part of their 
booty. In the night, it seems, the owner of the hive 
was awakened by the most ravishing strains of music, 
coming at set intervals from the direction of his bee- 
garden. He went out with a lantern to ascertain the 
cause of it, and discovered it to proceed from the 
interior of one of his hives. Full of perturbation at 



26 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

this miracle, he went and roused the Bishop, and 
acquainted him with the extraordinary state of affairs ; 
and the Bishop coming with his retinue and lifting up 
the hive, they found that the bees had taken posses- 
sion of the consecrated wafer, and placed it in the 
upper part of their hive, having first made for it a box 
of the whitest wax, an exact replica of the one stolen. 
And all around this box there were choirs of bees 
singing, and keeping watch over it, as monks do in 
their chapel. " With which story/' adds the narrator 
prophetically, " I doubt not but some incredulous 
people will quarrell." 

In their directions for hiving a swarm, the mediaeval 
bee-masters were always quaintly explicit. The 
dressing of the skep which was to receive the swarm 
was a particularly elaborate process. When the skep 
was new, you were recommended to scour it out with 
a handful of sweet herbs, such as thyme, marjoram, 
or hyssop ; and this was to be followed by a second 
dressing of honey and water, or milk and salt. But 
the preparation of an old skep must have been a 
rather disgusting affair. You were to put " two or 
three handfuls of mault, or pease, or other corne in 
the hive, and let a Hogge eat thereof. Meanwhile, 
doe you so turne the Hive, that the fome or froth, 
which the Hogge maketh in eating, may goe all about 
the Hive. And then wipe the Hive lightlie with a 
linnen cloth, and so will the Bees like this Hive 
better than the new." 

When the swarm was up, and " busie in their 
dance," you were to " play them a fit of mirth on a 
Bason, Warming-pan or Kettle, to make them more 
speedily light." We are assured that the swarm 
would fly faster, or slower, according to the noise 
made. If the fit of mirth were in rapid measure, the 
bees would fly fast and high ; but with a soft leisurely 
music, they would go slowly, and soon descend. This 
curious custom of " ringing the bees " is undoubtedly 
of Roman origin ; but whether it was introduced by 
Caesar's followers, or those of Claudius in the first 



BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 27 

century, or whether the old English bee-masters 
themselves derived it from their classic reading, is 
hard to determine. It is still to be heard in many 
country districts, and its exponents seem to retain 
all the faith of their forefathers in its efficacy. Prob- 
ably, in mediaeval times, when bee-gardens were 
much more plentiful than they are now, the custom 
had at least one undeniable merit : it proclaimed to 
the various hive-owners in the vicinity that a swarm 
was in the air, and that its rightful owner was on 
the alert. In this way, no doubt, dishonest claims to 
its possession were largely prevented, or, at least, 
discouraged. 

The question whether the noise made by ringing 
has any real effect on the swarming bees is still not 
absolutely decided. With the exception of the old 
skeppists, not a few of whom still exist in out-of- 
the-way rural corners, modern apiculturists have 
long discarded the custom as a gross superstition. 
But it has recently been suggested that the din made 
by old-fashioned bee-keepers when a swarm is up 
may have a real use after all. It is conjectured that 
the cloud of bees — which at first is nothing but a 
chaos of flashing wings, the whole contingent darting 
and whirling about indiscriminately over a large 
area together — is really dispersing in search of the 
queen. The suggestion put forward is that they 
follow her by ear, as she is supposed to utter a 
peculiar piping sound when flying. The din of the 
key and pan may, it is said, prevent the bees hearing 
this note and following her in her first erratic con- 
volutions, and thus the swarm is more likely to pitch 
on a station near home. The theory is interesting, 
but hardly tenable. Old popular observances of 
this kind are seldom based on even the vaguest 
thread of fact, and it is much more probable that 
no effect whatever is produced on the bees by the 
ringing. 

With regard to the right of a bee-keeper to follow 
his swarm into a neighbour's land, it is interesting 



28 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

to have the assurance of one of these ancient writers 
that " if they will not be stayed, but, hasting on 
still, goe beyond your bounds; the ancient Law of 
Christendome permitteth you to pursue them whither- 
soever, for the recovery of your owne." But, the 
writer adds, if your swarm goes so fast and so far 
that you lose sight and hearing of them, you also 
lose all right and property in them. In this case you 
have no legal alternative but to leave the bees to 
whomsoever may first find them. In view of recent 
disputes on this matter, wherein the law laid down 
appears to have been both vague and arbitrary, it 
is useful to be able to point to so ancient an authority 
in vindication of the bee-keeper's rights. 

There is hardly any detail in bee-government 
which had not its curious observance or superstition 
in mediaeval times. One and all seemed to believe 
in the old Virgilian notion that bees carried about 
little stones to balance their flight during windy 
weather, and some even thought that flowers were 
carried about in the same way. Red-coloured cloth- 
ing was supposed to be particularly offensive to bees, 
and one is warned not to venture near the apiary 
thus attired. In the hives the old bees and the 
young were believed to occupy separate quarters. 
In regard to this, it is a well-attested fact that, 
during the height of the honey season, the bees found 
in the upper stories of a hive are principally young 
ones who have not yet flown. 

We are told that if any of the bees have not 
returned to the hive at the end of the day, the queen 
goes out to find them and show them the way back. 
No one need be in any fear of overlooking the ruler 
of the hive because she can be known by her " lofty 
pace and countenance expressing Majesty, and she 
hath a white spot in her forehead glistering like a 
Diadem.' ' 

An old writer advises that all the hives should 
have holes bored right through them to prevent 
spider-webs. He was also of opinion that the bees 



BEE-KASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 29 

swarmed because of the queen's tyranny, and if she 
followed them, they put her to death. He informs 
us that the drones were honey-bees which had lost 
their stings and grown fat. This was a very old 
idea, with which the sceptical Butler dealt in the 
following fashion : " The general opinion anent the 
Drone is that he is made of a honey-bee, that hath 
lost hir sting ; which is even as likelie as that 
a dwarfe, having his guts pulled out, should become 
a gyant." But the bee-masters of the Middle Ages 
were ever intolerant of other people's mistaken ideas, 
while supporting with the gravest argument and 
show of learning equally benighted superstitions of 
their own. 

A little book published in 1656, and called " The 
Country Housewife's Garden," is interesting, as it 
was probably written for cottagers by one almost in 
the same humble walk of life, whereas the bee-books 
generally of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
were, for the most part, the work of men of consider- 
ably higher station. 

This book, almost alone of its kind, harbours no 
fine theories on bee-keeping, but keeps throughout 
to rule-of- thumb methods. The writer, evidently 
caring little for speculation as to the origin of bees, 
but confining his remarks to practical honey-getting, 
takes up the following wholesome position : " Much 
discanting there is of, and about the Master Bees, and 
of their degrees, order, and Government : but the 
truth in this point is rather imagined, than demon- 
strated. There are some conjectures of it, viz., wee 
see in the combs diverse greater houses than the 
rest, and we commonly hear the night before they 
cast, sometimes one Bee, sometimes two or more 
Bees, give a lowde and severall sound from the rest, 
and sometimes Bees of greater bodies than the com- 
mon sort : but what of all this ? I leane not on 
conjectures, but love to set down that I know to be 
true, and leave these things to them that love to 
divine." The " greater houses " here mentioned 



30 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-FEE 

were, no doubt, the large cells in which the queens 
are bred. Just before swarming-time, as many as 
nine or ten of these are sometimes to be found in one 
hive. 

The same writer has the inevitable ill word against 
the drones. These, he says, " are, by all probability 
and judgment, an idle kind of bees, and wastefull, 
which have lost their stings, and so being as it were 
gelded, become idle and great. They hate the bees, 
and cause them cast the sooner.' * 

Never did creature come by so bad a name, and 
so undeservedly, as the luckless drone with these 
old scribes. Another of them speaks of the drone 
as "a grosse Hive-Bee without sting, which hath 
beene alwaies reputed a greedy lozell (and therefore 
hee that is quicke at meat and slow at work© is fitted 
with this title) : for howsoever he brave it with his 
round velvet cap, his side gowne, his full paunch, and 
his lowd voice ; yet he is but an idle companion, 
living by the sweat of others' brows. For he worketh 
not at all, either at home or abroad, and yet spendeth 
as much as two labourers : you shall never finde his 
maw without a good drop of the purest nectar. In 
the heat of the day he nieth abroad, aloft, and about, 
and that with no small noise, as though he would doe 
some great act : but it is onely for his pleasure, and to 
get him a stomach, and then returns he presently to 
his cheere." 

But it is among the writings of the old bee-men with 
a taste for the quack-doctor's art that some of the 
quaintest notions are to be found. We are told 
that honey, well rubbed into the scalp night and 
morning, is a sovereign remedy for baldness, and if 
it was mixed with a few dead bees and a little old 
comb, well pounded, it was still more efficacious. 
Dead bees, dried and reduced to a powder, form a 
principal ingredient in all sorts of nostrums of the 
time. This powder, mixed with water and drunk 
every morning, is recommended as an unfailing 
cleanser to the system. And if the heads of a large 



BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 31 

number of bees are collected, burned, and the ashes 
compounded with a little honey, it makes an excellent 
salve for all sorts of eye disorders. 

There was a famous preparation called Oxymel, 
which was in great vogue in mediaeval times. It 
seems to have been nothing more than a mixture of 
honey, water, and vinegar ; but it was accredited 
with extraordinary virtues. It was an infallible cure 
for sciatica, gout, and kindred ailments ; and one 
writer also tells us that it was " good to gargarize 
with in a Squinancy." 

But honey and dead bees were not the only pro- 
ducts of the hives which were pressed into medical 
service. Wax also was believed to have exceptional 
curative powers in all sorts of human ills. It had 
the faculty of curing ulcers, and " if the quantity of a 
Pease in Wax be swallowed down of Nurces, it doth 
dissolve the Milke curdled in the paps." It was 
also used as an embrocation for stiff joints and aching 
muscles. The supposed curative value of beeswax 
in its natural state, however, was as nothing compared 
to its capabilities when distilled, This preparation, 
known as Oil of Wax, and famous at the time all the 
world over, seems to have come nearer the ideal of a 
panacea — a cure-all — than anything else before or 
since. The making of Oil of Wax seems to have 
been a very complicated affair. First the wax had 
to be melted, poured into sweet wine, and wrung out 
in the hands. This was done seven times, usin v 
fresh wine at each operation. Then the wax was 
placed in a retort with a quantity of red-brick powder, 
and carefully distilled. A yellow oil came over into 
the receiver, and this was distilled a second time, 
when the " Coelestiall or Divine medicine " was ready. 
Miraculous portents seem to have accompanied 
its preparation, for we are told that " in the coming 
forth of this Oile there appeareth in the Receiver 
the foure Elements, the Fire, the Aire, the Water, 
and the Earth, right marvellous to see." 

The power to stop immediately the falling out of 



32 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

the hair, heal the most serious wounds in a few days, 
and cure toothache and pains in the back, can be 
reckoned only among its minor virtues. Much greater 
properties were claimed for Oil of Wax, for it not only 
" killeth worms and cureth palsy and distempered 
spleens, but it bringeth forth the dead or living child.' ' 

One last extract must be given from the same 
old writer. It relates to the generation of bees, and 
brings us out, perhaps, on the highest pinnacle of 
the marvellous. After a learned dissertation on the 
method of breeding bees from a dead ox — assuring 
us, however, that if we can procure a dead lion for 
the purpose, it will be much better, as then the bees 
will have a lion-like courage— the writer goes on to 
explain how bees may be produced in another way. 
We are to save all dead bees, burn them, sprinkle 
the ashes with wine, and then leave them exposed to 
the sun in a warm place. In a little while, we are 
told, all the bees so treated will come to life again, 
and we shall then have a new stock ready for hiving. 

Dipping into these time-worn records of the Middle 
Ages, with their embrowned, scarce legible type and 
their antiquated phraseology, one comes at last to 
realise how very little the old bee-masters actually 
understood of the true ways of the honey-bee, or, 
indeed, of any real essential in bee-craft. And yet 
the production of honey and wax must have been 
an industry very largely developed in those days. 
Somehow or other, in spite of archaic theories and 
useless interference in the work of their hives, these 
people must have contrived to supply , a market of 
whose magnitude we can nowadays form little con- 
ception. The trade in wax alone must have been a 
very large one, for, except in the poorest tenements, 
this formed the only available source of artificial 
light. And honey was in much more universal 
demand than it is now, because cane-sugar could 
hardly have developed into a serious rival as a sweeten- 
ing agent among the masses at a time when it stood, 
perhaps, at two shillings a pound. 



BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 33 

But in speculations of this kind, it must be borne 
in mind that, although the men who wrote about bees 
displayed so picturesque an ignorance in all matters 
appertaining to their charges, these formed a very 
small minority among the bee-keepers as a whole. 
Probably the bulk of the supply in honey and wax 
came from bee-gardens, whose owners neither knew 
nor cared anything about books, and were concerned 
only in the practical side of the work, where their 
knowledge, hereditary for the most part, amply 
sufficed for the part they played in it. 

Moreover, it is only in latter-day, scientific apicul- 
ture that the work of the bee-master counts to any 
great extent. Nowadays, under the light of twentieth 
century knowledge, this is competent to bring about 
the doubling, and even trebling, of the honey-harvest 
possible under the ancient methods. But the old 
skeppists did, and could do, little more than look on 
at the work of their bees, and here and there put a 
scarce availing hand to it. Nearly all the credit for 
the results achieved in those days must be given to 
the bees themselves, who, untold ages before, had 
brought to finite perfection their remarkable systems 
and policies. In all likelihood the bee-masters, the 
practical men who owned the hives, had much the 
same shrewd faculty of leaving things alone in far-off 
times as we observe among the skeppists of the last 
generation. In many ways, what they did at last 
come to do they did ill, notably in the apparently 
insane practice of destroying the bees to obtain the 
honey. But even this was not so foolish a procedure 
as it appears to-day. It was a plain matter of busi- 
ness, according to the lights of the time. Their 
process was to condemn to the sulphur- pit all the 
lightest and the heaviest of their stocks. Experience 
taught them that the weak colonies stood little chance 
of getting through the winter unless they were artifici- 
ally fed ; while if the bees of the large colonies were 
preserved, after being robbed of their stores, they 
would need the same provision. It was a matter of 



34 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

arithmetic. Artificial feeding was then a much more 
costly affair than it is to-day, and the reckoning 
came out well on the side of slaughter. The worst 
part of the business, so far as modern scientific bee- 
breeders are concerned, is that the old system of 
destruction tended to preserve only those strains of 
bees who were inveterate swarmers ; while the steady, 
industrious stay-at-homes, who accumulated the 
largest stores of honey, were invariably exterminated. 
This is a fateful legacy to have passed on, when we 
consider that one of the chief aims of modern bee- 
science is to abolish swarming altogether. The swarm- 
ing habit is one of the greatest obstacles in the way 
of a large honey yield, and until a race of non- 
swarming bees has been evolved by modern breeders 
there will always be this element of uncertainty in 
the honey harvest. 

Latter-day beemen, therefore, join the chorus of 
disapproval of this old, senseless custom of bee- 
burning, rather because it has given them the task 
of undoing the work of ages before any progress is 
possible, than from the generally accepted humani- 
tarian reasons. 



CHAPTER IY 

AT THE CITY GATES 

IN a village in Southern Sussex, close under the 
green brink of the Downs, there live two bee- 
keepers who represent, in their widely divergent 
methods and outlook, the extremes of beemanship 
as still extant in modern times. 

The one dwells in a little ancient thatched cottage, 
set in the heart of an old-fashioned English garden, 
where dome-shaped hives of straw are dotted about 
at random amidst a wild growth of the old-fashioned 



AT THE CITY GATES 35 

English flowers. The other has built himself a trim 
villa on a hillside, topped with a sheltering crest of 
pine-wood ; and here he has established a great 
modern honey-farm, replete with every device and 
system of management known to apiarian scientists 
throughout the two worlds. 

One might suppose, on leaving the village street on 
a fine May morning and coming upon these two set- 
tlements in the open country beyond, that all the 
romance and old-world flavour of bee-keeping were 
inevitably to be found in the ancient bee-garden, 
where the droning music of the hives seems to origin- 
ate in the thicket of blossoming lilac, and red-may, 
and veronica, the hives themselves being the last 
things one noticed in such a tangle of bright-hued 
flowers. To expect sentiment in the other quarter 
— a great cindered tract of country, with its lon£ 
parallel rows of modern hives, all painted in various 
colours, its dwelling-house that might have been trans- 
planted bodily from a well-to-do London suburb, and 
its line of outbuildings, with their bustle of business, 
and coughing oil-engine, and reverberation of ham- 
mer and saw — was to expect something evidently out- 
of-date and impossible. As well look for art in a 
Ghetto as to seek reverence for ancient bee-customs 
in a twentieth-century trading concern such as this, 
established to supply the market for honey just as a 
Manchester factory turns out calico and corduroy. 

Many lovers of country life, peripatetic artists and 
chance pedestrians for the most part, came to the 
village with this notion firmly impressed upon them, 
and, visiting the old bee-garden and finding the old 
beautiful things there in abundance, went no farther, 
and became no wiser. They wandered round the 
crooked, red-tiled paths of the garden with its ancient 
proprietor ; stooped under bowers of living gold and 
purple ; waded through seas of scarlet poppy and 
blue forget-me-not and tawny mignonette ; came 
upon old beehives in all sorts of shady, unpremedi- 
tated corners ; and steeped themselves in mediaevalism 



36 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

up to the eyes. The very song of the bees seemed 
to belong entirely to past days. None, surely, 
but a hopeless Vandal could put a colony of bees in one 
of the ugly square hives, and expect them to go honey- 
seeking in the old harmonious, happy way, sanctified 
of the ages. And so they never ventured up the hill 
to the great bee-farm, but kept to the garden below, 
and listened by the hour together to the quaint talk 
of its white-headed, smock-frocked owner, or stood 
valiantly at the foot of the ladder when he climbed 
up to dislodge a swarm from the moss-grown apple- 
boughs, or helped him to scour the new straw skeps 
with handfuls of mint and lavender, or beat out weird, 
unskilful music with the door-key on the old brass- 
pan when a swarm was high in the air. 

Much could be learnt, it is true, from quiet days 
cpfmt in thft old bee-garden, especially in May, before 
the earliest swarms were ready to forsake the hives. 

The first faculty to be acquired was that of wan- 
dering among the bees, or standing between their 
straw houses, undismayed at their incessant and often 
terrifying approaches. Whatever confidence one may 
place in bee-keepers' assertions that their bees never 
sting, it is a bold man who can preserve entire equani- 
mity when bees are settling continuously on his hands, 
his face, his clothing, and a whole flying squadron 
of them are shrilling vindictively about his ears. No- 
thing will come of it, he knows, if only he can keep 
still. But the tendency to turn and flee, or at least 
to beat off these minatory atoms with wildly waving 
arms, is all but irresistible for the novice. It is only 
their way, he is assured, of expressing or of satisfying 
their curiosity ; and, this being done, they fly off 
harmlessly enough to give a good report of him to the 
ruling powers within the hive. But he knows that 
this report is sometimes anything but good. At 
least, there are a few luckless individuals in the world 
who dare not venture within a dozen yards of a bee- 
hive without being set upon unmercifully, and chased 
by an angry squad of these tart virgins for the space 



AT THE CITY GATES 37 

of a quarter-mile. Moreover, in certain states of the 
weather — when thunder is about, and the air is tense 
and still — bees will often sheath their barbed daggers 
in any human skin, even that of their owner, who has 
gone among them daily all the season unmolested. 
There is, therefore, a fateful element of chance in 
all near watching of beehives, a sensation of being 
under fire — fine discipline enough, but, for the timor- 
ous, hardly to be reckoned among the easy joys of 
existence. 

These first deterrents, however, being happily over- 
come, the watcher is sure to be caught up, sooner or 
later, in the sheer fascination of the thing, and to find 
himself recklessly, almost breathlessly, looking on at 
what is nothing eke than a great informing pageant 
of life. 

He stands, as it were, a stranger at the gates of a 
city, inhabited by the most interesting, and in some 
respects the most advanced, people in the world. Of 
the inner life of the city, apart from the deep busy 
murmur that surges out to him, he learns nothing, and 
will learn nothing until he puts sentimental pride in 
his pocket, and makes pilgrimage to the great bee- 
farm on the hill. But here, in the meanwhile, is food 
enough to satisfy the keenest appetite for the mar- 
vellous. In and out through the yawning entrance- 
gate of the city, under the hot May sunshine, there 
are thousands of busy people coming and going. The 
broad threshold of the hive is completely hidden 
under opposing streams, the one setting out towards 
the fragrant fields and hedgerows, the other tumbling 
and seething in, almost every bee dragging after her 
some kind of mysterious treasure. 

The outgoing bees start on their journey in two 
different fashions. Some emerge from the hive and 
rise at once on the wing, lancing straight off into the 
sunshine ; and these are foragers, who have already 
made several journeys afield since the sun broke, hot 
and rosy, over the eastward hill. But others, essay- 
ing their first excursion for the day, creep out of the 



38 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

murmurous darkness of the hive, and come with a 
little impetuous rush to the edge of the alighting- 
board. Here they pause a moment to flutter their 
wings and rub their great eyes free of the hive-twi- 
light. And then they lift into the air, hover an 
instant with their heads towards their dwelling, taking 
careful stock of it, sweep up into the blue, and volley 
away with the rest towards the distant hill-side, white 
with its bridal wreath of clover-bloom. 

The homing bees move much more sedately. They 
come sailing in like bronze argosies laden to the 
water's edge. Those bearing full sacs of clover- juice 
for the honey-making seldom carry an outside load of 
pollen as well. They have all to do in bringing their 
distended bodies to a safe anchorage on the entrance- 
board, and charge headlong into the hive, possessed 
of only one idea — to hand their garnered sweets over 
to the first house-bee they chance upon, and then to 
hurry out in search of another load. The pollen- 
bearers are impelled by the same white-hot energy ; 
but their cargoes are infinitely more cumbersome, and 
demand a more leisurely pace. Some with panniers 
heaped up with a deep orange-coloured material, 
must rest awhile on the threshold before gathering 
energy enough to drag their glowing burdens through 
the city gate. Others just fail to make the harbour, 
and sink down on to the grass below, to wait for the 
same freshet of strength that is finally to bring them 
into the security of the populous haven. Scores of 
them do not try for harbour at first tack, but, coming 
safely into the calm waters of the garden, rest awhile 
on the nearest leaf or blossom, panting and tremulous, 
until they are able to wear sail for the last reach 
home. 

There is infinite diversity in the loads of these 
pollen-carrying bees. Hardly a colour, or shade of 
colour, in the rainbow fails to pass during every 
moment across the thronging way. Every bee 
carries a half-globe of this substance, beautifully 
rounded and shaped, on each of her two hind-legs. 



AT THE CITY GATES 39 

It is possible, by marking the colour of her burden, 
to tell with certainty what flower she has been plun- 
dering on each of her trips. This bright orange, 
which makes always the largest and heaviest bales in 
the stream of merchandise, is from the dandelions. 
From the gorse-flowers come loads of deep rich brown 
almost as weighty. The charlock, that mingles its 
useless, wanton beauty with every farm-crop, yields 
the bee interminable gold. White clover, red clover, 
sainfoin, all load up the little hive coolies with dif- 
ferent shades of russet. From the apple-orchards 
come bursting panniers of pale yellow ; the black- 
berry-blossom yields pollen of a delicate greenish- 
white. When summer comes, and the poppies make 
scarlet undertones amidst the wheat and barley, these 
winged merchant- women stream homeward with their 
pollen-baskets laden with funereal black. 

But, if you watch a hive at work on any bright 
spring or summer morning, you will see single bees 
occasionally pass with loads whose source has never 
yet been fathomed. The lean, glistening, rufous 
stuff that is continually borne through the hustling 
crowd is resin gathered from poplar or pine, and used 
to glue the straw hive down to its base-board, or to 
stop up draughty crevices and useless corners, or, 
diluted into varnish, to paint the honeycombs with 
an acid-proof, preservative film. But now and then 
comes a bee with a load. whose colour shines up like 
a danger-signal in darkness. Brilliant scarlet, or soft 
rose-crimson, or pale lavender, or gleaming white — who 
shall say in what far, forgotten nook of the country- 
side she has been adventuring, or what rare blossom 
she has chanced upon in the wilderness, and, despoiling 
it of its maiden treasure greedily, has quickened into 
duplication the beauty that was its reason for life ? 

Yet the greatest wonder about all this pollen- 
gathering is that each separate load has been taken 
entirely from one species of flower. The little half- 
spheres are packed into the pollen-cells indiscrimi- 
nately, orange on brown, pale yellow mingled with 



4 o THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

green, or buff, or grey. But each pair of panniers, 
representing a single journey, contains the pollen- 
dust of one kind of blossom alone. Going out into 
an English lane or meadow to watch the bees at work, 
the first conviction borne in upon an observer is that 
the bees are darting about from flower to flower with- 
out other thought than to load up from any and every 
capable blossom that stands in their way. But closer 
scrutiny reveals a curious plan and order in this, as 
in everything else that the honey-bee undertakes. 
Tracing an individual bee in her progress along the 
flowery verge of the lane, you will soon see that she 
visits only one species of blossom. If she starts on 
hawthorn, it will be hawthorn all the way/ If her 
load of willowherb-nectar or pollen is not yet a full 
one, she will overpass a score of tansy-knots or waving 
jungles of meadow-sweet, just as inviting and re- 
sourceful, apparently, to reach the one scanty patch 
of purple at the end of the lane. 

Why she should be at such pains to keep the pollen 
separate as she gathers it, only to get it inextricably 
mingled with every other kind in the storehouse at 
home, is a problem that none but a bee can solve. 
But all the honey-bee's reasons and motives in life 
are made up of a curious blend of cold-drawn sense 
and sentiment ; and it may be inferred that need 
and fancy have an equal influence in guiding her in 
this, as in everything else she does, from her cradle- 
cell to her grave. Not altogether without seriousness, 
it may be hazarded that quite as probable a reason 
for her way of pollen-gathering is that she deems a 
certain shade of colour makes a more becoming flying- 
robe, as that she keeps each load of pollen pure, un- 
blended, because of some imperious, economic need 
of the hive. The factor of sex, in all observation of 
the ways of the honey-bee, is no more to be considered 
a negligible one than it is in the critical contemplation 
of the human species of hive. 

All this incessant coming and going of the busy 
foragers is alluring enough to the looker-on, but 



AT -THE CITY GATES 41 

there is evidence of many other activities equally 
interesting. The work of collecting nectar and pollen 
is obviously only a part of the duties of this self- 
immolated spinster-race. Here and there in the 
seething, hurrying crowd there are bees who do not 
move with the rest, but, anchored securely in the full 
force of the living current, with heads lowered and 
turned towards the hive, are engaged in fanning their 
wings, and this so swiftly that nothing of the wing t>ut 
a little grey mist can be seen. Looking more carefully, 
you will make out that these bees are arranged in 
nearly regular rows, one behind the other, in open 
order, so that the conflicting tides of foragers can pass 
uninterruptedly between. If the watcher is bold 
enough to bring his ear down to the level of the hive, 
he will make out a steady hissing noise that rings 
clear above all the din and turmoil made by the in- 
cessant travellers to and fro. These rows of fanners 
are seen to stretch from the hive-door right to the 
edge of the footplate, but principally on one side ; 
and still closer observation will reveal the fact that 
there is a regular system of relief among them. 
Though the general volume of sound never abates one 
jot, every few minutes one or another of these station- 
ary bees moves away, her place being immediately 
taken by another, who settles down to the common 
task in line with the rest. The reason for all this is 
plain enough : the fanners are engaged in ventilating 
the hive, drawing a current of vitiated air through 
the entrance on one side, which flanks, but does not 
oppose, a corresponding current of pure air sucked 
in on the other. 

All through the warm days of spring and summer 
this fanning squadron is constantly at work ; nor 
does it cease with the darkness. Chill nights find the 
ranks weakened and reduced to perhaps only a few 
bees, or even to none at all when a cold snap of 
weather intervenes. But in the dog-days, or, as the 
ancients used to say, when Sirius, the honey-star, is 
shining, the deep sibilant note of these fanners rises, 



42 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

in a populous apiary, almost to the voice-strength of 
a gale of wind. To come out then under the stars 
of a summer night, and stand listening in the tense, 
fragrant darkness to this mighty note, is to get an 
impression of bee-life unattainable at any other 
season. In the daytime the sound is intermingled, 
overwhelmed, by the chorus of the flying bees. But 
now all are safely at home. Each hive is packed 
from floor to roof with tens of thousands of breathing, 
heat-producing creatures : the necessity for ventila- 
tion is quadrupled, and, far and wide in the bee- 
garden, the fanning armies are setting to their work 
with a will. 

The freshman at this fascinating branch of nature- 
study, brought out into the quiet night to hear such 
gargantuan music, is always strangely affected by it, 
some natures incredibly so. In all the great placid 
void of darkened hill and dale around him, in the 
whole blue arch overhead, alive with the flinching 
silver of the stars, there is no sound but a chance trill 
of a nightingale, the bark of a shepherd's dog on the 
distant upland, or, now and then, the droning song of 
a beetle passing invisibly by. All the world seems at 
rest, save these mysterious people in the hives ; and 
with them the sound of labour is only redoubled. 
Bending down to the nearest hive in the darkness, the 
note comes up to one like the angry roar of the sea. A 
light brought cautiously to bear upon it, discloses the 
alighting-board covered with rows of bees, working, 
as it were, for their lives ; while other bees continually 
wander in and out of the entrance — the sentries that 
guard it night and day, just as soldiers guarded the 
gates of human cities in olden times. The novice at 
bee-craft, even the most staid and matter-of-fact, is 
invariably plunged into marvelling silence at the 
sight. But if the night be exceptionally hot and 
oppressive, and the fanning army unusually large, the 
bee-master with an eye for dramatic effect generally 
finishes the tiro's wonderment by showing him an old 
trick. He lowers the candle until the flame is just 



AT THE CITY GATES 43 

behind the squadron of ventilating bees, and at once 
all is darkness : the current of air drawn out of the 
hive has proved strong enough to extinguish the light. 

It has been said that there are guard-bees who 
watch the hive-door day and night. To the unskilled 
human eye one bee looks very like another, and it is 
difficult to understand how, in the many thousands 
that pass, the guards manage to detect an intruder so 
unerringly, and to eject her with such unceremonious 
promptitude as is always shown. Probably it is not 
by sight alone that these occasional interlopers are 
singled out. The sense of smell in the honey-bee is 
extraordinarily acute, and this, no doubt, assists the 
guards in their difficult work. It is well known that 
a queen-bee must possess a very distinct odour, as her 
mere presence abroad, even when shut up in a box, 
will attract the drones from all quarters. In all like- 
lihood the peculiar aroma from each queen-bee im- 
pregnates the whole colony, and thus the guard-bees 
are able at once to distinguish their own kin from that 
of alien stocks. 

Still watching the outside life of the hive in the old 
bee-garden, many other interesting things come to 
light. In such an establishment, even if it be only an 
old-fashioned straw skep, perhaps more than twenty 
thousand individuals are located ; and obviously 
some regular system of cleaning and scavenging is 
indispensable. This work can be seen now, going on 
uninterruptedly in the midst of all the other busy 
enterprises. Every moment bees come labouring 
out, bearing particles of refuse, which they throw over 
the edge of the foot-board, and at once shoulder their 
way back for another load. Other bees appear, carry- 
ing the bodies of comrades who have died in the hive ; 
and every now and then one comes struggling through 
the crowd, bearing high above her a strange and 
ghastly thing, perfect replica of herself, but white 
throughout, save for its black beady eyes. This is 
the unborn bee, dead in its cradle-cell. Infant mor- 
tality is an evil not yet overcome even by the doughty 



44 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

honey-bee, and many are carried out thus, especially 
in early spring. Watching these undertakers of the 
hive in their gruesome but necessary work, a singular 
fact can be noted. While all other debris is merely 
cast over the brink of the entrance-board, where it 
accumulates day by day on the grass below, these 
dead larvae are never disposed of thus. They are 
carried right away, their bearers taking wing and 
flying straight off over the hedgerow, to drop them at 
harmless distance from the neighbourhood of the hive. 

There is still another kind of work going briskly 
forward round the gates of the bee-city. Certain 
among these stay-at-home bees seem to exercise a sort 
of common overseership. They help those weighed 
down with too heavy a cargo to reach the city gates. 
If a lump of pollen is dropped in the general scuffle, 
these bees seize it and take it into the hive. Some- 
times a bee comes eddying downward, smothered 
from head to foot with pollen, like a golden miller, 
and she is immediately pounced upon by these super- 
intendents, and combed free of her incommodious 
treasure. Others see to the grooming of the young 
bees, about to essay their first flight. The youngster 
sits up, protruding her tongue to its fullest extent, 
while half a dozen bees gather round her, licking and 
stroking her on every side. At last her toilette is 
done, and she is liberated, when, with a little flutter 
of her wings, she lifts high into the blue air and sun- 
shine and makes off with the rest to the clover-fields, 
glittering afar off in the joyous midday light. 

For insensibly the hours have worn on — it is noon 
— and the tense thronging life, the deep rich labour- 
song, of the bee-garden seem to have reached their 
height. But suddenly a greater noise than ever arises 
on all sides : a steady stream of bees, larger and 
bulkier than the rest, is pouring out of every hive. 
The drones, the lazy brothers of these laborious 
vestals, have roused at last from their sleep, and are 
coming abroad for their daily flight. In twos and 
threes, in whole battalions, they hustle out, and begin 



AT THE CITY GATES 45 

their noontide gambols about the hive, filling the air 
with a gay, roistering song. In a little while they will 
be all gone to their revels, and the bee-garden will 
seem, by comparison, strangely quiet. But now the 
sudden accession of energy is unmistakable. With 
the awakening of the drones there seems to be a 
new spirit abroad. The air is no longer filled to 
overflowing with busy foragers. Many of these have 
joined the dance round the hives, so that each bee- 
dwelling is the centre of a singing, gambolling crowd 
moved rather by a spirit of play, almost of idleness, 
But this brief moment of relaxation soon passes. The 
drones betake themselves to their marital pleasuring 
in the fields. The noisy midday symphony dies 
down to the old steady monotone of work. And the 
watcher at the gates of the bee-city turns to retrace 
his steps down the flower-garlanded way of the old 
pleasance, satiated with wonders, yet not satisfied, 
his curiosity only quickened a thousandfold for that 
which has been inexorably held from him, a glimpse 
of what is happening behind those baffling walls of 
straw. 

Wending slowly homeward, and pondering, he asks 
himself many questions. What is the reason, the final 
outcome, of all this earnest, well-directed labour ? 
What is done with the pollen that has been carried in 
all the morning long ? Where there is obviously so 
much system, and unanimity, and ingenious division 
of endeavour, there cannot fail to be a supreme and 
governing intelligence to allot the part that each must 
play. This story of a queen — of a single bee, larger 
than all the rest, to whom all pay allegiance, and who 
spends her whole life in the dim labyrinth of the hive, 
like the Pope in the Vatican — is it a truth, or only a 
figment of the ignorant, bucolic brain ? If this queen 
exist, if every hive have indeed its absolute monarch, 
who directs the whole complex life and policy of the 
bee-city, where in the scale of reasoning creatures 
must she be placed ? 

And then, if he be wise, the student will learn at 

c 



46 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

last to give the picturesque old bee-garden its true 
appraisement. Ancient things conserve their beauty, 
and win the love of the right kind of lovers, more and 
more with every century that glides by. Only their 
usefulness, their import in the tide of human know- 
ledge and progress, has gone with the years. It is so 
with the bee-garden under its Maytide robe of green 
leaves and rainbow blossoms. It is beautiful in its 
glad appearances, its echo of old voices, its odour of 
the sanctity in ancient ways and days. But it can 
tell us nothing of all we want to know. It can only 
ask us riddles to which we have no answers. For 
these we must set aside old fanciful scruples ; turn 
our backs, once for all, on its enchantment and its 
sweetness ; bend our steps unswervingly towards the 
great modern bee-farm on the hill. 



CHAPTER V 

THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 

A DOCTOR DRYASDUST will manage to impart 
to the truths he meddles with a disastrous 
air [of dullness and stagnation ; but to walk in a 
fools' paradise of beautiful, artistic error is to lay one- 
self open to an infinitely worse fate. There never 
was a truth in Nature that was dull or uninterest- 
ing, except in its human presentment. There never 
was a pretty worthless fiction that did not show 
its dross and tinsel when brought out into the search- 
ing light of day. Romance, the spirit of poetry, 
have largely changed their venue of recent years. 
The unconscionable delver among old things, old 
thoughts, old conventions, on the strand of Time, 
has tarried so long in his one little florid corner that 
he is in some danger of being caught by the tide. 
He must soon either mend his pace or swim for it. 



THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 47 

Human regard is turning more and more towards 
those who deal in living verities — the men who search 
the stars, who win new powers out of the common air, 
who find at last the authentic teachings in the old 
worn texts of the stones and brooks. These are the 
true poets, romancists, tellers of wondrous tales ; 
and these will hold the crowd — which is never far 
astray in its intuitions— when all the singers of sick 
fancies and the harpers on frayed golden strings 
have gone off in melancholy dudgeon to their own 
place. 

The old story — which has held such a long and 
honoured position in school text-books, and in the 
writings of those who tell of Nature's wonders from 
the commanding watch-tower of the study fire — 
the old story of the queen-bee ruling her thirty or 
forty thousand dutiful subjects, and guiding them 
unerringly in all their marvellous exploits and enter- 
prises, must go now with the rest. For the truth, 
as modern observers have unquestionably established 
it, is that the queen-bee is no ruler in the hive, but 
even a more obedient subject than any. The real 
instigators and contrivers of everything that takes 
place within the hive are the worker-bees themselves. 
The queen has neither part nor lot in the direction 
of the common polity ; nor has she any power, mental 
or physical, to help in the carrying out of public 
works. Her sole duty is that of motherhood, and 
even in this she derives all initiative from the sovereign 
worker-bees. She is little more than an ingenious 
piece of mechanism, and carefully guarded and 
cherished accordingly. She has certain propensities, 
and certain elemental passions, which she can always 
be counted on to exercise in certain well-defined and 
limited ways. But as an intelligent, originating 
force she counts for nothing. The mind in the hive 
is the collective mind of the whole colony, apart from 
the queen and drones — an hereditary, communal 
intellect evolved through the ages, the sum and total 
of all bee experience since the world of bees began. 

C2 



4 8 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

If, however, modern science compels us to divest 
the mother-bee of all her regal state and quality, 
and thus destroy one of the prettiest delusions of 
ancient times, it is only to take up a story of real 
life more alluring and romantic still. In the light 
of new understanding the old facts take on a mystery 
and excite a wonderment greater than ever before. 
If we found the life of the hive an enthralling study 
when we supposed it to originate from one winged 
atom endowed with acute and commanding abilities, 
how much more fascinating must it prove when we 
come to see that all this complex system of govern- 
ment is instituted and kept together by the har- 
monious working of tens of thousands of reasoning 
beings ? 

Reasoning — it is a big word, a double-edged thing 
that requires careful handling. We have been so 
long accustomed to use it only in regard to our own 
magnificent mental processes that it savours almost 
oi the ridiculous to bring it to bear upon such a tiny 
et-cetera in the brute creation as the honey-bee. 
And yet, the deeper we go in the study of the bee 
and all her works, the more difficult it becomes to 
find a word that shall more fittingly meet the case. 
Instinct will not do. Instinct implies a dead perfec- 
tion of motive, born of omniscience, working through 
unthinking, unvarying organisms to an equally per- 
fect end. But in neither project nor performance can 
the honey-bee be said invariably to achieve, or even 
to aim at, perfection. It will be seen hereafter that 
her motives, her methods, the results she brings 
about, all show frequent, undeniable error or deviation. 
She attempts to carry through a sound enterprise, 
but abandons it on finding unforeseen difficulties in 
the way. She will persevere blindly in an obviously 
foolish piece of business, and fail to see her mistake 
until both energy and resources are at an end. Sud- 
den emergencies may find her ready with the saving 
stroke of last ingenuity, or merely plunge her into 
listless despair. Courage, industry, economy, wise 



THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 49 

forethought, or still wiser afterthought, are all com- 
mon traits in her nature. But she may develop idle- 
ness, unthrift, slovenliness, or even downright dis- 
honesty, if chance or circumstance indicate the way. 

And what are all these but the defects or attributes 
of reason ? If bees and men, each admittedly rooted 
in divinity, be prone to the like failings and incon- 
sequences, who shall discriminate between them, 
dividing arbitrarily natural cause and effect ? 

Watching bees at work for the first time through 
the glass panels of an observation hive, or in the 
almost equally informing modern hive with movable 
combs, this question continually arises, and there 
seems only one answer for it. There is something 
curiously human-like in their movements over the 
crowded combs, and the old comparison of a bee-hive 
to a city of men is never out of mind. There are the 
incessant hurryings to and fro ; chance meetings of 
friends at odd street-corners ; altercations where we 
can almost hear the surly complaint and tart reply ; 
busy masons and tilers and warehouse-hands at work 
everywhere : a hundred different enterprises going 
forward in every thronging thoroughfare or narrow 
side-lane, from the great main entrance to the remo- 
test drone-haunted corner of the hive. 

You will see the huge, full-bodied queen labouring 
over the combs from cell to cell, with a circle of atten- 
dants ever about her. In the highest stories of the 
hive the honey-makers are at work, pouring the new- 
garnered sweets into the vats, or sealing over with 
impervious wax the mature honey. Where the 
nurseries are established, in the central and warmest 
region of the hive, the nurse-bees are hurrying in- 
cessantly over the combs, looking into each cell to 
mark the progress of the larvae ; giving each its due 
ration of bee-milk ; or, when the time arrives, walling 
up the cell with a covering that shall insure its privacy, 
but freely admit the air. Here and there the young 
bees have awakened from their transforming slumber, 
and are clamouring at the stoppings of their prenatal 



SO THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

tombs, gnawing their way out vigorously, or thrusting 
forth red, glistening, ravenous tongues, eager to end 
their long fast. Where these raw youngsters have at 
last won their way into existence, they can be seen 
assiduously grooming themselves, or searching the 
neighbouring comb for honey, while the nurse-bees 
are busy cleaning out the cells, just vacated, to make 
them ready for the queen when she comes by on her 
next egg-laying round. 

And all these operations are going forward simul- 
taneously on an incredibly large scale. Certain amaz- 
ing scraps of information are given to the wondering 
on-looker, which he hears, but can, at this ststge in his 
progress, seldom rightly estimate. He is told that 
the queen is the only mother-bee in the colony, large 
as it is ; that, in the prime of her maternity, she will 
lay as many as 3,000 eggs a day ; and that she has the 
power to produce either male or female eggs, or none 
at all, at will. He is told that, except when she leads 
forth the swarm, she goes out of the hive only once in 
her life, and this is her wedding-trip. On this one 
occasion she has traffic with the drone somewhere 
incredibly high up in the blue air and sunshine of the 
summer's day ; and that immediate death is her 
suitor's invariable portion ; that she returns at once 
to the hive, and thereafter for the rest of her life, 
which may endure for years, she passes her time in 
immaculate widowhood, yet retaining her fertility to 
the end. 

She is pointed out to the gaping novice as she 
travels her unceasing round of the brood-combs, and 
her various attributes are explained to him. He is 
shown how much larger she is than the worker-bee ; 
how her bodily structure differs in a dozen important 
ways ; how her instincts and habits resemble those of 
the common worker hardly in a single particular. 
Finally he is told something at which the most polite 
credulity may well demur. Although the mother-bee 
is to all appearances of a totally different race, the egg 
from which she was raised was identical with that 



THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 51 

which produces the little worker. Her bodily size, 
the change in the number and shape of her organs, her 
mental differences, are all due to treatment and diet 
alone. There is no reason why she should not have 
been an ordinary neuter working-bee, nor why any 
one of the thirty or forty thousand little workers in a 
hive should not have become a great queen-bee, the 
sole mother of an entire colony, save for the edict of 
the communal mind. More wonderful still, the 
drones, the male bees — the brothers, never the 
fathers, of their own hive, as has been so often stated 
— owe the fact of their sex entirely to the will or whim 
of the hive authorities, working through the docile 
agency of the queen. Until the moment before the 
egg is laid, the question of the sex of the resulting bee 
is held in abeyance. This big lusty drone, with 
exuberant masculinity obvious in every posture and 
act ; his totally different organism ; his incapacity 
for anything else than the fulfilment of the one office 
required of him, for he cannot even entirely feed himself; 
his habit of spending his life either in a comfortable 
lethargy of repletion at home, or in amorous knight- 
errantry abroad — this drone might have been 
a little plodding worker-bee, with shrunken yet 
elaborated body and curiously developed brain, whose 
one idea in life is to get through the largest amount of 
work before death claims her, and who is armed with 
a formidable poisoned sting, while the drone has none. 
It is useless at this stage to tell the learner that 
all these vital differences — miracles, indeed, in the 
ordinary meaning of the word — are brought about 
by the leading powers of the hive in certain simple, 
easily explainable ways. He has lost, for the mo- 
ment, all sight of and interest in the details, however 
extraordinary, in the perception that has dawned 
on him of the vastness of the entire plan, Here is a 
community that, to all appearances, has solved 
every problem relating to the w r ell-being and progress 
of a crowded, highly organised society. Questions 
that are now vexing socialistic philosophers in the 



52 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

human world, or are looming dark in the immediate 
future — problems of numerical increase in relation 
to food-supply, the balance of the sexes, communal 
or individual ownership in property, due qualifica- 
tion for parenthood, the hegemony of might or right 
— all seem to have been happily settled long ago in 
this remarkable bee-commonwealth. In itself a 
prosperous, well-conducted hive appears to offer a 
living example, a perfect object-lesson of what 
Socialism, carried out to its last and sternest conclu- 
sions, must mean to human and apiarian communities 
alike. Here is a number of individuals — counting 
anything from ten thousand to fifty or sixty thousand, 
according to their condition and the time of year — 
living healthily and comfortably in the space of a few 
cubic feet. The principle, all for the greatest good 
of the greatest number, is elevated into a prime 
maxim, to which every one must bow. The fiction 
of royalty is maintained in harmony with the perfect 
republican spirit. The females are supreme in every- 
thing, the males in nothing. Growth of population 
is accelerated or retarded, according to estimations 
of the immediate or future supply of food. The pro- 
portion of the sexes is varied at will. The rule, that 
those who cannot work must not live, is applied with 
relentless consistency. All the garnered wealth of 
the State is held in common for the common good. 
When the settlement becomes too populous, and the 
boundaries cannot be extended, a large part of its 
inhabitants are forced to emigrate, taking with them 
only so much of the state property as they can carry 
in their haversacks, and relinquishing all claim to 
the rest. The governing females have apparently 
agreed among themselves that only one of their 
number shall exercise the privilege of motherhood ; 
and when her fertility declines, she is deposed, and 
a new mother-bee, specially raised for the purpose, 
installed in her place. 

All these, and a host of other facts as to bee-life, 
are crowded into the bewildered brain of the tiro 



THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 53 

until its capacity is exhausted, and he can take no 
more. He begins to see, at length, that he is ap- 
proaching a great matter too fast, and from the 
wrong direction. Like a scholar who, resolving on 
a new and difficult branch of study, commences at 
the end of his treatise instead of at the beginning, he 
finds himself in the midst of terms and equations of 
which he knows nothing. All this desultory peering 
into hive-windows, and listening to scraps of as- 
tounding information, is nothing but opening the 
book of bee-life here and there at odd disjointed 
pages, getting a swift impression of certain lurid, 
kaleidoscopic details, but no grounding in the con- 
secutive science of the facts. There is nothing for it 
— if he be resolved to know the life of the honey-bee 
truly — but to turn back to the first page of the 
volume, and steadily work his way through to the 
end — if end there be. 

All know the English honey-bee — the Black Bee, 
as she is called, partly to distinguish her from her 
foreign rivals, and partly, it would seem, because 
she is not black at all, but a rich brown — but all do 
not know her origin. Probably she came to us from 
the tropics by easy stages, swarm outflying swarm, 
until the most adventurous crossed the English 
Channel in remote ages, when it was only a narrow 
race of water, or even before Great Britain was de- 
tached from the mainland. 

It was the black bee, and not the motley-coloured 
Italian or other varieties, who came to us thus, for 
the same reason, probably, that the Celts came — 
because they were a hardy race, loving, and being 
more fitted for the bracing northern atmosphere 
than the heat and languor of the south. Modern 
bee-breeders who are trying so hard to acclimatise 
in Britain the golden-girdled or silver-fringed bee- 
races of other lands, might well ponder this fact. 
No keener controversy rages to-day among English 
bee-masters than this one of the relative merits of 



54 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

native and foreign stocks. But assuredly Nature 
has not erred in this respect. South Down sheep 
can be reared in any county, but nowhere so fine as 
on the Sussex Downs. The like principle holds good 
with the English bee. The ages have evolved her 
from her tropic beginnings to make her what she is — 
a doughty, essentially British creature, thriving 
against all odds of fickle climate, when her more 
tender sisters from the south are hard put to it for 
a living. She has held her own against them, and 
more than her own. In bumper seasons, such as 
we get all too rarely, when, in sober truth, the land 
is flowing with honey, there is little to choose between 
the rival honey-makers. But through good and bad, 
early and late, for steady, dogged industry, invincible 
hardihood, tangible results, the English black bee 
has out-distanced all competitors. Thousands of 
years have gone to her making, and thousands more 
may conceivably fit the yellow-skirted Ligurian for 
British work. But labour for so remote a posterity 
were altruism meeter for angels than for men. 

In her old primaeval fastnesses the honey-bee is 
little likely to have troubled herself with- hive-making, 
but to have hung her combs to some convenient 
branch in the forest, much as the bees in India do 
to-day. The habit of seeking some hollow tree or 
cleft in the rock grew upon her probably as she 
advanced northward, and some nightly or seasonal 
shelter became more and more an imperious need. The 
present-day customs of wild creatures give some 
inkling of their ancestral ways, but it is in their 
occasional aberrations from these customs that we get 
the truest indications of what their original state 
must have been. Lost swarms of bees, if they fail 
to pitch upon some better site, will often build in the 
open, either suspending their waxen houses from some 
horizontal branch, or making them in the heart of 
a thick bush. 

The ways of the honey-bee are full of such devia- 
tions, due, perhaps, to the working of old ancestral 



THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 55 

memory rousing dimly in the midst of modern needs. 
The issue of a swarm may be nothing else than the 
survival of an old process, vital enough in its day, 
but, under the present civilised conditions of bee-life, 
lacking the whet of entire necessity. For, in all re- 
spects, the life of the bee, ancient as it is, is an evolved 
civilisation, and not a surviving, aboriginal state. 
It is conceivable that the foxes have their holes, and 
the birds their nests, much after the same fashion as 
in the days when Adam invented love-making. But 
the twentieth-century honey-bee is not of this kind. 
The communal habit itself may even have been a 
comparatively late introduction in her progress. It 
is possible to get some idea of the path she won for 
herself through the ages by studying the ways of 
creatures now living, but immeasurably less advanced 
than the bee. There are distant connections of hers 
— lonely little wood-wasps and others — which never 
associate with their kind, but get through the short 
summer hours in solitude, and die with the waning 
season, leaving the perpetuation of their species to 
the children they never see. The common wasp is 
nearer the honey-bee in development, but still 
infinitely far behind. The fecundated queen- wasp 
comes out of her winter hiding-place, fashions a 
cell or two in some hole in the ground, and deposits 
her first eggs, thus laying the foundation of a colony 
which, populous enough in the season, must never- 
theless perish with the next winter chills. 

In the primaeval tropics the honey-bees may have 
lived in separate families, each with its teeming 
mother, its indolent, lie-abed father — the Turveydrop 
of creation — and its bevy of youngsters, every one 
going out, when grown, to establish a home for itself. 
The modern bee-city, with its complicated systems 
and laws, and its innumerable multitudes, may have 
originated only when change of habitat and climate 
brought about the necessity for a new order oi 
things. Living in perpetual warmth, in a land where 
blossom followed blossom in unending succession, 



56 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

there would be no need for such co-operation. The 
one little family, snugging close in its moss-roofed 
corner, could sustain its own temperature; and 
where there was an unceasing array of nectar- 
producing flowers, foresight would have been folly : 
the winter larder would have been left to take care of 
itself. 

But as the young bees, leaving their homes, and 
flying ever northward, came first into temperate 
zones, and then into the fringe of Arctic influences, 
the conditions gradually changed. The perpetual 
sipping-garden was left behind ; and a season came 
in each year — short at first, but inevitably lengthen- 
ing- — when there were no flowers. Hard necessity 
must have taught the bee, then, first to gather 
together with her kind for warmth during the cold 
season ; and then, as this got longer and longer, to 
make some food-provision for winter days that would 
eke out endurance until the spring sun again wooed 
the earth into flower-giving. Thus the first com- 
munal bee-nests must have been evolved from the 
universal need of the race : the first common store- 
houses instituted: a host of unforeseen difficulties 
and side-issues encountered, and means for dealing 
with them contrived. The spirit of invention must 
have been busy then with the race, and taxed to the 
limit of her resources. For never did Pandora open 
celestial casket upon earth with more redoubtable 
consequences, than when the Great Artificer set up 
the honey-bee as an exemplar of city-building to the 
nomadic world of men. 

From the crowding together of the separate bee- 
families for mutual protection against the elements, 
to a complete and permanent fusion of life and 
interests, must have been only a step, as Nature 
works. But then there must have been stirring times 
— social upheavals, educative disasters, a cataclysmic 
war of sex. Bee-life must have been shaken to its 
very foundations. When and how the woman-bee 
first got the upper hand in the direction of affairs, 



THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE 57 

it is unimportant to determine. But it is certain 
that she got it, and has kept it ever since. The 
population problem must have been the great, over- 
whelming one. With hundreds of prolific mothers 
in the hive, each having enough to do at home in 
rearing her own children, and a crowd of lazy, irre- 
sponsible drones who could do nothing but dance in 
the sunshine or go a- wooing, how were the daily needs 
of the hive to be satisfied, leaving out of account 
the provisions that must be made for coming winter 
days ? It was clearly a case of reform or annihila- 
tion ; and it may be conceived that the woman- 
bees, in default of masculine initiative, took the 
reins into their own hands. 

It is a prophetic story. First they discovered 
their latent powers. The harmless ovipositor re- 
vealed itself as a prime weapon of offence. Thus 
the army was with the revolutionaries, and the rest 
was easy. A great, far-reaching scheme was set 
afoot. Motherhood was to be a privilege of the 
few and the fittest ; work the compulsory lot of the 
mass. Hard times had already bred a lean, unfer- 
tile gang among them, and it was discovered that 
famine rations in the nursery meant a wholesale 
increase in these natural spinsters of the race. Hence- 
forth the little sex-atrophied worker-bee was multi- 
plied in the hive, while the fully nurtured mothers 
were gradually reduced to a few — at last to one 
alone. It was a triumph of collective self-sacrifice 
for the well-being and high persistence of the race. 

All this may be imagined as having taken place 
in infinitely remote times, long before man succeeded 
in distinguishing himself from the apes. In the 
honey-bee of to-day, and her life in the modern hive, 
we get a sort of quintessence of the ages ; a creature 
developed in mind and body by her unique conditions, 
these conditions again imposing upon her unique 
systems of life. Like Ruskin's Venetian, she must 
live nobly or perish. Much more is required of her 
than the role of domestic and political economist. 



5 8 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

To make the modern bee-hive a possibility there 
must be architects, mathematicians, and chemists 
within its walls. Sanitary science must have its 
skilled exponents, or the hive would change into a 
death-trap within a few hours. There must be land- 
surveyors ready to explore the country, just before 
the issue of the swarms, to determine for them their 
new location. There must be overseers, gang-fore- 
women, everywhere to superintend every work in 
progress throughout the hive. Above all, there must 
be a supreme central power, a far-seeing intelligence, 
to divine the imminent common need, and to set the 
forces of the State to work, in right time and order, 
to provide for it. If all these cannot be proved to 
exist in a hive of bees to-day, at least the necessity 
for them is undeniable ; and as undeniable, the 
achieved results. 



CHAPTER VI 



EARLY WORK IN THE BEE-CITY 

THE " turn of the days," when the winter sun 
has passed its nadir of feebleness and just made 
its earliest wan recovery in the skies, marks the 
true beginning of the honey-bee's year. Then the 
first few eggs are laid in the heart of the brood-nest ; 
the drowsy cluster begins to show an interest in life ; 
the water-carriers bestir themselves, watching for a 
bright warm morning, that they may sally forth to 
ply their trade. 

Dangerous work it is at this season, yet most neces- 
sary. Without water the rearing of the young bees 
is impossible on any but the smallest scale. Water is 
needed at every stage of their development, and, lack- 
ing it, the progress of the colony must be fatally 
checked. Even the mature bees will starve and die 



EARLY WORK IN THE BEE-CITY 59 

in the midst of plenty, if their honey-stores are candied 
and no water is available to dissolve the unassimilable 
sweets. The hive that shows honey crystals thrown 
down on the floor, and littering the entrance, is sure 
to be in desperate case. The bees are tearing open 
every store-cell, casting away the solidified honey as 
refuse, to get at the moister portion below. If the 
cold spell does not break, or the bee-master is un- 
ready with his artificial supplies, the colony must 
perish. So the water-bearers watch for the sunshine, 
and its first warm glance brings them out to rifle the 
nearest dewdrops, or track down by its bubbling music 
the hidden woodland stream. Many die at this work 
in the early months of the year, chilled by their load 
on the homeward journey, or snapped up by hungry 
birds. But at every cost the future life of the colony 
must be assured, though, of all the hive-people, none 
but the queen-mother will be alive to see it in its 
summer fullness. 

We are accustomed to think of a hive of bees as a 
permanent institution, Death playing his old, un- 
ceasing, busy part, but young Life more than out- 
playing him, just as the way is in a city-hive of men. 
The analogy holds good, but in bee-life the changes are 
infinitely more rapid. The life of the worker-bee 
extends, at most, to six months or so ; and in the busy 
season she may die, worn out by labour, in as many 
weeks. The reapers of last year's honey-harvest 
were dead by the autumn. The late-born bees, that 
went into winter quarters with polished thorax and 
ragged wings, survived only long enough to nurture 
their immediate successors ; and these, again, will 
live but to bring to maturity the young spring-broods. 
Not a bee among them will ever again go honey- 
gathering. Except for the long-lived queen-mother 
and the old hive and its furniture, each colony with 
every year becomes a totally new thing. 

Hibernation, in the true sense of the word, has no 
part in bee-life. The queen-wasp and countless other 
creatures hibernate, passing the cold months in a 



60 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

torpor of sleep until the enduring warmth of another 
year lures them back to active existence. But the 
honey-bees have a better way : they gather together 
in a dense, all but motionless cluster in the heart of 
the hive, with their precious queen in their midst and 
their food-stores above them. At this time honey 
is their only necessary food, and very little of this 
suffices to keep up the needful temperature of the 
colony. When they are out and about at their work, 
or busy within the hive, the nitrogenous pollen must 
be added to their daily ration of nectar to build up 
wasted tissues ; but now honey, the nectar concen- 
trated, the heat-producer, is all they want. The bees 
of the cluster nearest to the combs broach the full 
cells beneath them, and the honey is passed through 
the crowd, each bee getting her scanty dole. 

Economy is now reduced to a fine art. None 
knows when a fresh supply may be available, although 
no chance will be lost to replenish the larder at the 
first sign of returning warmth. But now the barest 
minimum of food is taken, and as the nearest cells 
become emptied of their contents, the cluster moves 
a step upward. Thus there is a system of slow brow- 
sing over the combs, until the dense flock of bees has 
reached the highest limit of the hive, when new 
grazing-ground must be taken. But the movement 
of the cluster is exceedingly slow, perhaps the slowest 
thing in the animate world. All recognise that 
existence depends on the stores being eked out to 
their uttermost. It is a scientific damping-down of the 
fires of life — a carefully thought-out and perfected 
plan for preserving the greatest possible number of 
worker-bees alive on the smallest practicable amount 
of food, so that the largest possible army of nurse- 
bees and foragers may be at hand in the spring time 
to raise the young bees that are to represent the future 
colony. 

But there is no hibernation. It is doubtful even 
if bees ever sleep, either in their season of greatest 
activity or in the coldest depths of winter. At all 



EARLY WORK IN THE BEE-CITY 61 

times a sight rap on the hive will awaken an im- 
mediate tmorous outcry within. Sturdy knocking 
will soon bimg the guard-bees to the entrance to find 
out the cause of the disturbance, and many bees lose 
their lives from this vigilant habit alone. On frosty 
days the tits may often be seen perched on the en- 
trance-board of a hive, beating out a noisy tattoo, 
and snapping up every bee that emerges ; and many 
other small birds have discovered the same never- 
failing source of a meal. 

The fact that, with a healthy stock of bees, the in- 
terior of a hive always preserves its clean condition, 
is usually a great puzzle to the novice. In the sum- 
mer, when the bees are passing continually in and 
out, this is not so vast a matter for wonder. But 
in winter-time, when the colony is confined to the 
hive often for weeks together, it is remarkable that 
neither the combs nor floor of the hive are ever soiled 
by excreta. This is a difficulty that the sanitary 
department in the hive has successfully coped with 
long ago. It must have been one of the earliest 
problems that presented itself when the honey-bee 
first evolved the communal habit. The Ancients 
believed that all the excreta of the hive were de- 
posited by the bees in certain privy-cells, and thence 
removed at intervals by the scavenging authorities. 
There is nothing in this notion, absurd as it is, outside 
the scope of bee-ingenuity ; on the contrary, such a 
crude device would be little likely to commend itself 
to the hive-people, as it would be ridiculously inade- 
quate to the case. How great must be the problem 
of the preservation of cleanliness in a hive can only 
be understood when the whole conditions are con- 
sidered together, and that from a human standpoint. 
Putting the figures unwarrantably low, what measure 
of success could the greatest genius that ever lived 
among sanitary scientists hope to achieve, if he 
were given the task of keeping in cleanly condition, 
perfect ventilation, and even temperature, a building 
where 10,000 individuals were crowded together 



62 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEF 

storey above storey — a building hermetically sealed 
throughout except for one small opening at the lowest 
level, which must serve for all purposes of entrance 
and exit to its denizens, as wetf as sole conduit for 
the removal of the foul air and introduction of the 
pure ? The task would be gigantic enough in the 
summer-time, when a large proportion of the inhabi- 
tants were away at work during a greater part of the 
day ; but in winter, when all were continuously at 
home for weeks together, what conceivable device, or 
combination of devices, could prevent the building 
soon developing into first a quagmire and then a 
charnel-house, to which the Black Hole of Calcutta 
would be a model sanitary retreat ? 

Yet the difference between such a building and a 
beehive is only one of degree. The same conditions 
are involved, and the same evils must be combated. 
Relatively, the problem is the same in each. In the 
case of the beehive, the necessity for this close system 
of life has been very gradually imposed on its in- 
habitants ; and age-long custom, working on the 
individual, has at length produced a race marvellously 
adapted to its special needs. Probably the habit of 
retention of faeces while in the hive was at first a 
voluntary one. This, carried on from generation to 
generation, would react on the physical organism 
until use became second nature, and finally the 
present condition was reached. It is a fact that the 
bee is now incapable of voiding its excreta within 
the hive, or when at rest. The muscles involved can 
come into action only during, or immediately after, 
vigorous flight. In the winter, when long spells of 
cold occur, not a bee leaves the hive perhaps for 
weeks consecutively ; but an hour's warm sunshine will 
infallibly bring the whole company out in a little 
eddying crowd about the hive, and then the neces- 
sary action of nature can readily be seen. These 
cleansing flights occur on all practicable occasions, 
and fulfil a double purpose ; for when the cluster 
forms again, it will be between combs where the 



EARLY WORK IN THE BEE-CITY 63 

stores are unexploited, and the old, steady, upward 
feeding-march begins again in a new place. In 
extraordinary seasons, when the cold weather is 
much prolonged, the population of a hive may die of 
starvation within reach of plenty, no opportunity for 
these flights having presented itself, and the cluster 
therefore not having left its original station. And 
here the bee is plainly the victim of her own advanced 
acumen. Instinct would never have led her into such 
a foolish plight ; but reason, being liable to err, errs 
here egregiously. 

The comparison of a modern beehive with a building 
similar in construction, and as densely crowded with 
human beings, brings the whole problem to a sharp 
definition. In such a building, unless a through- 
current of air could be established, the preservation 
of life must soon become impossible. Yet the bees 
have triumphantly overcome all difficulties. Whether 
in winter or summer, the air within the hive is almost 
as pure as that in the open, while the temperature 
can be regulated at will. For the ordinary purposes 
of the hive — honey-brewing, and the hatching of the 
young brood — it is kept uniformly at 8o° to 85 . 
When the wax-makers are at work, it rises suddenly 
to 95 or so, while at the time of the swarming-fever 
it is often allowed to go even higher. In the hottest 
days of summer, however, unless the emigration- 
furore possesses the colony, the interior of a well- 
made hive seldom shows a temperature of more 
than 8o°. And all this is brought about in a very 
simple fashion. 

The sanitary expert, of merely human stock, could 
attack the problem in only one way. He must have 
a through-current of air, impelled either mechanically 
or automatically ; and he must have heating-appa- 
ratus acting within the building itself, or warming 
the incoming draught of air. But the bees work on 
totally different principles. They will have nothing 
to do with the through-current system of ventilation 9 
If the ingenious bee-master pierce air-holes in the 



64 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

walls of a hive, the bees will spend the night in care- 
fully stopping them up again. In the old bee-garden 
we saw the fanning-army drawing out the impure air. 
These bees had their heads pointing towards the 
entrance ; but, inside the hive, there was another 
army of fanners, facing the opposite way, and thus 
helping to drive the same sidelong current. Through- 
out nearly the whole interior of the hive on hot days 
fanning-bees can be seen, all helping to keep up this 
movement. The result is that the pure air, being 
sucked in at one side of the entrance, flows round the 
hive and travels out at the other side, much as a roi e 
goes over a pulley-block. The swiftest current of air 
keeps to the walls and roof of the hive, the air in the 
centre being changed more slowly. Thus the honey- 
combs, which are always in the upper stories, lie in the 
full stream, and the moisture, which the maturing 
honey is continually giving off, is carried rapidly 
away ; while the brood-combs, lying in the lower, 
central part, are ventilated more slowly, the air being 
thoroughly warmed before it reaches them. The 
larger the fanning-army is, the more swiftly flows the 
air, and the faster the heat of the hive is carried off. 
In this way the bees can regulate the hive- temperature 
to the requirements of the moment, putting more 
numerous gangs to work in the hottest season, or 
stopping the fanners altogether in mid-winter, when 
the natural, buoyant heat-exhalation from the cluster 
is sufficient to keep up the gentle circulation which 
then is alone needed. 

Sometimes, when the colony is unusually large, 
the fanning-party will be divided into two detach- 
ments, one at each side of the entrance, leaving the 
centre for the inflow of air. In this case a double- 
loop system of ventilation appears to be formed. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 

IT has been said that the ways of the honey-bee 
are nearly all subject to variation — that in bee- 
life there are few hard-and-fast, undeviating laws. 
The rule of one queen-mother only to each hive 
appears to be more absolute than any other, yet it is 
not without its exceptions. Well authenticated in- 
stances are on record where two queens have existed 
amicably in the same hive, each laying her daily 
quota of eggs unmolested by the other, and, appa- 
rently, with the full approval of the hive-authorities. 

It is now also certain that a skilful bee-master can 
accustom his bees to the presence of more than one 
queen. Recent experiments in America on this head, 
although convincing enough as far as they go, need 
the test of time before their practical value to apicul- 
ture can be rightly estimated. To multiply its 
domestic deities may prove anything but a blessing 
to the harmony and welfare of a hive. But the fact 
has been well established that the old rule, of one 
queen at a time, may be upset — whether permanently, 
and for the ultimate advantage of honey-making, 
time alone can tell. 

A single queen, when young and vigorous and of 
good blood, is able to keep an entire hive filled with 
brood throughout the short honey-gathering season. 
The brood-nest of a modern frame-bar hive has a 
comb-surface of over 2,000 square inches, giving 
about 50,000 cells available for the breeding of young 
worker-bees. This represents, at times of greatest 
prosperity, an enormous floating population ; but if 
several queens can be permanently established in one 
hive, and the hives enlarged to permit each her fullest 
scope, the figures will soon begin to stretch out into 
infinity. Two facts are well known to experienced 
bee-keepers — that a large stock gathers more honey 
than two small stocks containing between them the 

63 



66 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

same number of individuals ; and that, when the 
honey-crop is in full yield, there are seldom enough 
bees to harvest it, The whole art of latter-day bee- 
keeping consists in bringing up the numerical strength 
of each colony to its fullest in time for the great main 
nectar-flow. Yet, in a good district and in a good 
season, when huge areas of clover or sainfoin come 
into full blossom at the same time, and the nectar 
must be gathered or lost within the space of a fort- 
night or so, the most populous apiary is seldom equal 
to the task. Probably, in exceptional seasons, half 
the English honey-crop is lost for want of bees to 
gather it. If, therefore, the new system of 'plurality 
of queens both justifies and establishes itself, the near 
future may see a revolution in all ideas relating to bee- 
manship. All that can be said for certain at present 
is that as many as five queens have been induced to 
occupy the same hive in peace and quiet together ; 
but whether this portentous state of affairs can re- 
main a lasting one is still to be proved. 

A curious and, to the expert, a startling outcome 
of these efforts to break down an old and almost 
universal custom in bee-life, is that the successful 
establishment of several mother-bees in a single hive 
appears to lessen the swarming impulse. Hives so 
treated do not send out a swarm so far as is known. 
One of the most disappointing experiences in bee- 
craft is to see prosperous stocks breaking themselves 
up into several hopelessly weak detachments just be- 
fore the great honey-flow, when strength of numbers 
is the one vital thing ; and if plurality of queens will 
prevent this vexatious evil, the old time-honoured 
custom is sure to go. 

The student of bee-life, watching the year's work 
in the hive from its earliest beginnings, and marking 
its steady, cautious development, will readily see how 
the ancient idea of the mother-bee's absolute mon- 
archy gained its vogue. The deception of appear- 
ances is all but complete. Right in the heart of the 
winter-cluster he sees the queen bestirring herself 



THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 67 

to lay the first eggs, and the bees around her slowly 
awakening to the duty before them. With the pass- 
ing of the weeks, he sees the brood-area steadily en- 
larging ; the hitherto close-packed throng of workers 
gradually extending itself over a larger space of comb ; 
the water-fetchers increasingly busy ; the pollen- 
gathering bees already at work in the crocus-borders 
of the garden, where the year's first gold and white 
and purple is gaily flaunting in the sun. He notes 
that the progress of the colony within the warm hive 
does not go by the calendar, but checks with each 
return of cold, and forges ahead only when the spring 
seems to be coming in right good earnest. He sees, 
even now, when February is waning and the hazel- 
catkins fill the bare woodland with a shimmer of 
emerald, that the colony still husbands its stores, 
eking them out with a long-sighted parsimony that 
shall be more than justified when the inevitable cold 
break comes in the flowery midst of the English May. 
It is impossible to overlook the evidence of a wise, 
directing mind through it all ; and where should this 
be seated but in the brain of the single large bee, 
courted and fed and groomed unceasingly by the 
attendant host around her — she who is the teeming 
mother of past tens of thousands, and who carries in 
her body the seed of all the generations to come ? 

Yet the truth is that the queen-bee is the very re- 
verse of a monarch, both by nature and inclination. 
She possesses only the merest rudiments of intelli- 
gence. She has a magnificent body, great docility, 
certain almost unrestrainable impulses and passions, 
a yielding, womanish love of the yoke ; but she is 
incapable of action other than that arising from her 
bodily promptings. Her brain is much smaller than 
that of the worker. In a dozen different ways she is 
inferior to the common worker-bees, who rule her 
absolutely, mapping out her entire daily life and 
using her for the good of the colony, just as a delicate, 
costly piece of mechanism is used by human craftsmen 
to produce some necessary article of trade. 



6S THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

In a word, the queen is the sole surviving repre- 
sentative of the aboriginal female honey-bee. The 
aborted females, the workers, are almost as much a 
product of civilisation as the human race itself. 

Every step of the way now, in a study of the life of 
the bee, is hedged about with wonders. It is seen 
that the common worker-bee is raised in a cell allow- 
ing her only the barest minimum of space for develop- 
ment, while the queen has an apartment twice as large 
as she can possibly need. The worker-cells are so 
designed that as many as possible may be contained 
in a given area, and their construction involves the 
least possible amount of material. Therefore these 
cells are made in the form of a hexagon, this being 
the only shape approaching the cylindrical — the ideal 
form — of which a number will fit together over a plane 
surface without leaving useless spaces in between. 
Moreover, the cells needing to be closed at the bottom, 
half the material required for this purpose is saved by 
the device of placing the sheets of combined hexagons 
back to back, so that one base will serve for two cells. 
But it is not only in the construction of the cradles of 
the worker-bees that rigid economy is practised. From 
the moment that the egg hatches until the young grub 
changes into the chrysalis state, it is given only the 
smallest quantity of food that will support life and 
allow necessar}' development. 

In the case of the young queen-larva, however, 
a very different policy is instituted from the begin- 
ning. Not only is she given nursery-quarters allowing 
every facility for growth, but she is loaded with a 
specially rich kind of food night and day, until she 
actually swims in it. The nurse-bees are constantly 
pouring this glistening white substance into the cell 
for the whole five days of her larval existence, and 
the effect of this generous diet is obvious from the 
first in her more rapid growth, as compared with the 
worker-bee. A further advantage still is that the 
young queen has perfectly free access to the air at all 
stages of her development. The worker-cell is but 



THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 69 

sparsely ventilated, and that only through the narrow 
top, all its six sides and base being absolutely im- 
pervious. But the cradle-cell of the queen is not only 
made of a porous material throughout, but it is com- 
monly placed at the edge of the comb, where it 
stands out in the full current of ventilation, the air 
percolating the whole substance of its walls in addi- 
tion to entering freely at the large cell-mouth. Thus 
the main cause of the extraordinary difference in the 
development of the queen-bee and the worker is that 
of treatment ; the one being given unlimited rich 
food and oxvgen and room to grow in, the other 
receiving only meagre workhouse diet, restricted 
quarters, and little air to breathe. 

Yet, making every allowance for the stimulating 
or retarding effect of these agencies on the young 
female grub, we are still hardly any nearer to a solution 
of the mystery. We are compelled to believe that 
the egg which produces the worker is identical in its 
nature with that from which is evolved the queen-bee, 
because a simple experiment will at once dispel all 
doubt on the matter. If the egg deposited in the 
queen-cell be removed, and an egg taken from any one 
of the thousands of worker-cells in a hive be put in 
its place, the worker-egg will always produce a fully 
developed and accoutred queen-bee. On the other 
hand, if an egg be taken from a queen-cell and placed 
in a worker-cell, it will as infallibly hatch out into a 
common undersized worker. It would be sufficient 
tax on the credibility if the differences of queen and 
worker were only those of degree. If the queen were 
nothing but a large-sized worker-bee, in whom certain 
organs — which were atrophied in the worker — had 
received their full development, it would be a fact 
within comprehension ; but the queen differs from 
the worker not only in size and the capability of her 
organism, but also on several important points of 
structure. And how can mere food and air and cir- 
cumstance produce structural change ? The worker has 
nany bodily appliances, special members ingeniously 



7 o THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

adapted to her daily tasks, of which the queen is 
wholly destitute ; while the physical organism of the 
queen varies from that of the worker in several im- 
portant degrees. 

Some of these must be enumerated. The abdomen 
of the worker is comparatively short and rounded : 
that of the queen is larger and longer, and comes to 
a fairly sharp point. The jaws of the queen are 
notched on their inner cutting edge : the worker's 
jaws are smooth like the edge of a knife. The tongue 
of the worker has a spatula at its extremity, and is 
furnished with sensitive hairs : the tongue of the queen 
is shorter, the spatula is smaller, while the hairs show 
greater length. The worker-bee has a complicated 
system of wax-secreting discs under the horny plates 
of her abdomen : in the queen these are absent, nor 
can the most elementary trace of them be discovered. 
In their nerve-systems the two show difference, 
the queen possessing only four abdominal ganglia, 
while the worker has five. The queen's sting is 
curved, and longer than the worker's : the sting of 
the worker-bee is perfectly straight. On their hind- 
legs the workers have a curious contrivance which 
bee-keepers have named the pollen-basket. It is a 
hollowing of the thigh, the cavity being surrounded 
with stiff hairs ; and within this the pollen is packed 
and carried home to the hive. In the queen both the 
cavity and the hairs are absent. Her colour also is 
generally different from that of the worker-bee, her 
legs, in particular, being a much redder brown. 

Here is a problem for our great biologists — a 
problem, however, at which the plain, every-day 
man may well flinch. For we seem to have come 
face to face with new principles of organic life, facts 
incompatible with the accepted ideas of the inevit- 
able relation between cause and effect. The irre- 
sistible tendency at this stage is to hark back ; to 
repeat the experiment of the transposed eggs, and 
see whether no vital, initial circumstance has been 
overlooked. But the result is always the same. 



THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 71 

Nor can the most careful microscopical dissection 
of the eggs themselves reveal any differences. In 
this mystery of the structural variance between 
queen and worker, it would seem that we are forced 
to accept one of three alternatives. Either the egg 
contains two distinct germs of life, one developing 
only under the stress of hard times, the other only 
to the call of luxury. Or we must go back to mediaeval 
notions, and believe that the worker-bees give or with- 
hold some vital principle of their own during nurtur- 
ing operations. Or we must give up the problem and 
decide that creation works on lines very different from 
those on which we have hitherto grounded our faith. 

The difficulty is further complicated by the fact 
that this change of nature does not take place until 
relatively late in the life of the bee. The egg is three 
days in hatching. But the young larva is at least 
three more days old before nature has made the irre- 
vocable step along either of the divergent ways. For 
the experiment of transposition can be made with 
exactly the same result if undertaken with female 
bee-larvse not more than three days old, instead of the 
unhatched eggs. Indeed, this is an operation that 
the nurse-bees themselves perform, on occasion. If a 
hive loses its queen, and it happens that all the eggs in 
the worker-cells are hatched out, the bees will breed 
another queen from any one of the worker-larvae 
available. This is generally successful when the 
young grub has not passed the three days' limit. 
But, even when all the larvae of the hive are older than 
this, the bees will still attempt the task, knowing well 
that, without a queen, the colony must perish. In 
this case, however, the resulting queen will be defec- 
tive in various ways. Probably she will never be 
capable of fertilisation, and therefore the breed of 
worker-bees will be cut off at its source. Unless the 
bee-master supplies the colony with a new queen, 
properly fecundated, the hive will gradually fill up 
with drones, the old worker-bees will die off, and the 
stock must ultimately become extinct. 



72 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

When once the study of the inner life of the honey- 
bee has been undertaken, the watcher will soon realise 
that he has embarked on a stranger voyage than he 
ever contemplated, even in his most daring moments. 
In the old bee-garden there was a serenity, a quiet 
enduring bliss of ignorance, that chimed in well with 
his slothful, holiday mood. The sunshine, the flowers, 
the song of the wind in the tree-tops, and the drowsy 
song of the hives ; the voice of the old white-headed 
cottager weaving in his listener's ear the old, com- 
fortable arabesque of error ; the sudden, jubilant 
uproar of a swarm, filling the blue sky with music and 
the flash of unnumbered wings ; the night- quiet, with 
its deep underground bee-murmur, its dim half -moon 
peering over the hill-top, the shadowy bent figure of 
the old beeman listening at hive-doors for the battle- 
cry of rival queens, that should mean trouble on the 
morrow — it all comes back to the watcher now as a 
haven he has left inconsiderately, for a voyage over 
unknown, stormy seas. For now, with the inner life 
of the hive going on unmasked before his very eyes, 
wonder succeeds wonder almost without a break ; 
and each new fact that reveals itself is more perturb- 
ing, because more destructive of old, hallowed con- 
vention, than any that has gone before. 

The hive that has lost its mother-bee, and failed to 
provide her with a fully developed, fertile successor, 
is seen to be rapidly declining in its worker-population, 
while the horde of drones is increasing at a greater 
rate than ever. But where do these drones come 
from, if the very fount of bee-life has been dried up at 
its source by the loss of a fertilised queen ? The 
question brings the student to what is perhaps the 
most remarkable fact in the whole great book of 
natural history. 

We are not concerned, for the moment, with theo- 
logical matters ; nor will the thread of the story of 
the honey-bee be laid down, however briefly, for an 
excursion into the pulpit. Yet here is something 
that may well give wherewithal for thought. For 



THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN j$ 

nearly two thousand years the Doctrine of the Virgin 
Birth has been the centre of a bitter human contro- 
versy. Its liegemen uphold it as a main article of 
faith, eternally exalted from the odious need of proof ; 
its temperate opposers sadly and quietly set it aside 
as a natural impossibility. On one side the charge is 
want of faith ; on the other of blind credulity. And 
yet no one seems to have thought of looking into paths 
of creation other than human, to see if no parallel 
exists that may help both sides, and send the swords 
to sheath before a common mystery. The honey-bee 
is small among the fowls, but here she looms large in 
the world, a portentous symbol. It is a fact, now 
iacontestably proved, that the virgin queen-bee is 
capable of reproducing her kind, yet only the male of 
the species. If she is born late in the year, when no 
drones exist, and her fertilisation is therefore impos- 
sible, or if some imperfection of wing prevents her 
going out for her mating-flight, she will still set busily 
to work at her one function of egg-laying ; and these 
eggs will all hatch out into male bees. The same 
thing occurs in the case of the queenless hive, which, 
having neither worker-egg nor worker-grub, whose 
age is under the three days' limit, yet tries to raise a 
new queen from a larva perhaps four or even five days 
old. The queen thus created is queen only in name. 
She may have her ovaries completely developed, but 
otherwise she will be congenitally destitute. She will 
have neither the will nor power to receive the drone ; 
and the eggs that she lays so industriously only add 
to the crowd of useless males that will soon be the sole 
representatives of the doomed household. 

Following the progress of a bee-colony through 
the mounting days of spring, we see, with every week 
that passes, a larger area of comb occupied by the 
young worker-brood ; while about the middle of 
April the queen pays her first visit to the drone- 
combs, laying a single egg in each cell, as with the 
rest. It is commonly supposed that the queen is 
always surrounded by an adulatory retinue, each 



74 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

attendant bee keeping her head respectfully towards 
her sovereign, and backing before her as she pro- 
gresses over the combs. Something of this sort is 
constantly seen during breeding-time, but at other 
seasons the queen ordinarily receives little attention, 
passing to and fro in the hive with no more ceremony 
than is bestowed on any other of the bees. The 
mediaeval writers were aware that the queen had these 
attendants, and believed them always to be twelve 
in number, representing the twelve apostles. A 
little observation, however, will soon make it clear 
that the bees which surround the queen on her egg- 
laying journeys are neither devotees nor courtiers. 
They are actually her guides, her keepers, The 
queen's movements are all prompted by the inces- 
sant strokings and pushings and gentle touches of 
the antennae that she receives from these. Thus 
they allow her free passage over the combs, but stop 
her at each vacant cell, gathering close about her, 
evidently with the most absorbing anxiety and in- 
terest in the operation. First, she peers into the cell, 
examining it carefully. Then she rears ; the bees 
give way before her ; she takes a step or two onward 
until the end of her body is over the cell. And then 
she thrusts her abdomen deep into it, pauses a mo- 
ment, mounts again upon the comb, and the attend- 
ant bees at once resume charge of her, and manoeuvre 
her towards the next empty cell. This process never 
seems hurried, and yet in the height of the breeding 
season it must go on at an extraordinary pace. It is 
well attested that a good queen will thus furnish as 
many as two thousand to three thousand cells in a 
day, which gives an average of two eggs a minute, 
even supposing her to keep at the work without pause 
for the whole twenty-four hours. 

The cells designed to contain the worker-brood 
measure one-fifth of an inch across the mouth ; drone 
cells are larger, having a diameter of a quarter-inch, 
as well as greater depth. The queen may pass from 
one species of comb to the other, but she seldom 



THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 7$ 

makes a mistake. The egg deposited in the worker- 
cell hatches out a female ; that which is laid in the 
larger cell becomes a drone, or male bee. Obviously 
the deposition of the different kinds of eggs is well 
under the control of the queen. It will be also seen 
that not only does the mother-bee lay either male or 
female eggs at will, but their number also is subject 
to her discrimination. From the time when she 
begins ovipositing, until she reaches her period of 
greatest activity in early summer, the increase of the 
colony is not regular, but goes by fits and starts 
according to the weather, or the amount of incoming 
food. If the new honey is steadily mounting up in 
the storehouse, and pollen is plentiful, the work of 
brood-raising will go freely ahead ; but if unseason- 
able cold stops the work of the foragers, this 
will immediately affect the output of the queen, and 
under exceptionally adverse conditions egg-laying 
may be entirely arrested. This may also take place 
in the height of the season, and in full favour of 
sunshine and plenty, if the hive is a small one, and the 
limit of its capacity has been reached. The combs 
will then be full of either honey or brood, and the 
queen must wait until laying space can be cleared 
for her. That she is able to do this — that her powers 
can be augmented or restrained, according to the 
needs of the colony, and that the proportion of the 
sexes in the hive can be varied at will to suit like con- 
tingencies — can only be understood when the details 
of her life history have been passed under review. 

In the normal, prosperous colony, which we are 
now studying, the queen will be in her prime, and 
under natural conditions will remain at the head of 
affairs until she goes out with the first swarm in May 
or June. A queen-bee is at the zenith of her fecund- 
ity in the second year of her life. After that, her 
egg-laying powers steadily decline, although she may 
live to be four, or even five, years old. But the 
authorities in a hive rarely allow a mother-bee to 
retain her position after she has shown signs of waning 



;6 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

anergy. Preparations are at once set on foot for the 
raising of another queen. 

A very old queen will have lost her power to lay 
worker-eggs, and will have become nothing but a 
drone-breeder. But the bees are seldom caught 
napping in this way. Long before this happens the 
building of the royal cells will have commenced in the 
hive. A queen-cell has been likened, by various 
writers, to an acorn, and when half completed it bears 
a very close resemblance, both in size and shape, to an 
inverted acorn-cup. This is commonly hung mouth 
downwards at the side or base of one of the central 
brood-combs, but it may be placed right in the middle 
of the comb, in which case the cells around it are cut 
away to give it air and space. Whether the old queen 
herself deposits the egg in the royal cell — thus un- 
wittingly supplying the means for her own future 
dethronement — or whether the worker-bees transfer 
to it an egg or grub from a common cell, is not yet 
finally ascertained. As, however, the mere sight of 
a royal cell usually excites the queen to fury, the 
chances are that she is never allowed to approach it 
at any time, and the egg would then be placed there 
by the worker-bees. But, in the great majority of 
cases, it is probable that new queens are raised by 
enlarging an already existing worker-cell, in which an 
egg has been previously deposited. As far as is known, 
this is always the case when a young grub is used for 
the purpose instead of an egg. It is possible, also, 
that the queen is physically incapable of laying in a 
royal cell an egg that will produce a female bee ; but 
this curious point will be touched upon at a later stage. 

The old trite saying among beemen, that bees never 
do anything invariably, receives constant illustration 
in any near study of the ways of the honey-bee. It 
has been seen that a colony deprived of its q ueen, and 
having no worker-egg or grub less than three days old 
wherewith to make good its deficiency, is commonly 
doomed to early extinction. But, on rare occasions, 
colonies supposed to be in this plight will make an 



THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 77 

unexpected and inexplicable recovery. After a period 
of the doldrums, extending for three weeks or more, a 
sudden renewed activity and exhilaration is observ- 
able in the hive. The pollen-bearers, who have been 
hitherto almost idle, resume their busy work ; and, 
on the hive being opened, all the evidences of the 
presence of a fertile, laying queen-mother are again 
to be seen. In many instances in which a new lease 
of life has thus been vouchsafed to a colony under 
what seems an inexorable ban, no doubt appearances 
have been deceptive. The bees may have discovered 
in their midst a worker-larva not yet too far advanced 
for promotion to queenship, and thus have achieved 
their salvation at the eleventh hour. But, in at least 
one case, the testimony against the possibility of this 
seems complete. A nucleus stock, containing only 
three or four small combs and only about five hundred 
bees, was deprived of its queen. Ten days later every 
queen-cell that had been formed in the interval was 
destroyed, leaving in the hive not a single egg or bee 
in the larval state. Nevertheless, on the hive being 
opened after a further period of eighteen days, one new 
queen-cell containing an egg was discovered. And 
this egg duly hatched out into a fine, well-developed 
queen-bee. Assuming the facts to be true, and they 
seem to be incontrovertible, there is only one inference 
to be drawn from this : some enterprising bee of the 
colony must have gone to another hive and either 
begged, borrowed, or stolen a worker-egg. Apiarian 
scientists very rightly hesitate to ascribe to the honey- 
bee surpassing ingenuity of this kind on the testimony 
of a single case, however well authenticated. But 
other instances are on record nearly as indubitable, 
and as it is an unquestioned fact that worker-bees will 
carry eggs about from comb to comb within the space 
of their own hive, it does not seem wholly incredible 
that they may visit other hives in the immediate 
neighbourhood, especially when impelled to extra 
resourcefulness by so vital a need. The whole ques- 
tion is interesting in more ways than one, as it seems 

D 



7% THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

to bear very trenchantly on the problem of " Reason 
versus Instinct/ ' now busy in the thoughts of most 
modern naturalists. 

In whatever way the egg for the queen-cell may be 
furnished by the stock intending to raise a new 
mother-bee, the first sign of life is always the same — 
a tiny, white, elongated speck, glued on end to the 
base, or what must rather be called the roof, of the 
inverted cell-cup. In this state it remains about 
three days, when the larva hatches out, and at once 
the special treatment accorded to the young queen 
begins. She is loaded with rich provender from the 
first moment of her existence, living literally up to 
the eyes in the white, shining, jelly-like substance that 
the nurse-bees are continually regurgitating and pour- 
ing into the cells. This superfeeding process is con- 
tinued for about five days, when the larva has reached 
its full growth and the cell its greatest dimensions. 
The larva then stops feeding to spin itself a silken 
shroud before changing into the pupa state, and the 
bees seal up the door of the cell. In its completed 
state the cell loses its resemblance to an acorn, and 
is rather to be likened to a fir-cone. In the case of 
the common workers and drones, the cells are made of 
pure wax, only the capping being of mingled wax and 
pollen ; but the queen cell is constructed throughout 
of this porous material. 

The fully grown queen-bee is ready, and more than 
anxious to leave her cradle-cell in about fifteen or 
sixteen days after the laying of the egg. The bees, 
however, generally give her a first lesson in obedience 
even at this early point in her career. It is a critical 
time in the history of the hive, and much thought 
and care have been bestowed on the complicated 
business in hand. In the first place, it would never 
have done to allow the whole future welfare of the 
colony to depend on a single life alone. Therefore 
not one queen has been raised, but several. As 
many as five or six queens may be ready to hatch out 
in different parts of the brood-nest, and none of 



THE GENESIS OF THE QUEEN 79 

them will be permitted to break from her cell until 
the appointed time arrives. For each the cradle 
now becomes a prison. A small hole is bored in the 
cell- wall, through which the impatient captive is fed, 
pending the day when she is to be allowed her liberty ; 
and close guard and w r atch is kept over each cell to 
save it from the violence of the old queen, who is 
becoming hourly more restless and suspicious. 

The complete subjection of the mother-bee to the 
ruling worker-class in the hive receives here a striking 
confirmation. She is a true exemplar of a prevailing 
kind of femininity — comely of person, untutored in 
mind, an inveterate stay-at-home, a prolific mother ; 
and now there awakens in her the sounding chord of 
jealousy. Left free to act on her own impulses, she 
would soon bring about a speedy end to all the care- 
ful, long-sighted preparations within the hive. She 
would tear open each royal cell, and with one thrust 
of the curved, cruel scimitar that queen-bees use only 
on their equals in rank, its occupant would be ruth- 
lessly despatched, and her ow r n supremacy reinstated. 
But an impassable barrier stops the way — the col- 
lective will of the hive. The violent delight of killing 
has once been hers ; she will never know it again. 
Now her own fate is in the balance. It may be 
death, or a new life in a new home : all depends on 
the deliberate decree of those who have made her, 
and who now use or discard her, for their own pur- 
poses. If it be late spring, and the condition of the 
stock warrant it, this governing spirit may decide 
for colonisation, and the old queen may be disposed 
of by sending her off with a swarm. But other 
counsels may prevail. The times may be unripe, or 
the weather inopportune. And then Fate, in the 
shape of a merciless application of principles, will 
descend upon her, and her own wise children will 
ruthlessly put her to death. 

This State-execution of the queen, at the first sign 
of waning fertility, is a peculiarly pathetic as well as a 
tragic phase of bee-life. The stern, soured amazons of 

D 2 



So THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

the hive must have their systems and conventions 
in everything they undertake ; and they cannot even 
bring about the supersession of the old queen without 
due circumstance and ceremonial. Given that it 
would be against the best interests of the common 
weal that she should retain her life after the loss of 
her queenhood, one swift stroke would immediately 
determine the matter, and the law — that there shall 
be no useless members in the bee-republic — would 
have its due fulfilment. But old tradition rules that 
the queen shall suifer no violence from the v weapons 
of the common herd. She is to die, but her death 
must be brought about in another way. And so the 
fawning executioners gather round her, locking her 
in an embrace that tightens with every moment, until 
the breath is literally hugged out of her body. All 
her life has been spent in the midst of caresses, and 
now she is to die of them, close held to the last in 
that silent, terrible grip. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE BRIDE-WIDOW 

IN the heat and glow of the fine June morning 
you may see her, the young virgin queen, making 
ready for her nuptial flight. 

At first she is all hesitancy ; wandering to and fro 
amidst the crowd on the hive- threshold ; coquetting 
with the sunshine ; loath to return to the dim, pent, 
murmurous twilight she has forsaken, yet hardly 
daring to launch herself on wings that are still untried. 

For three long days and nights since her release 
from the prison-ceil she has been a curiously solitary 
figure in the busy throng within the hive. Instead 
of the enthusiastic, welcoming world she expected, 
she finds none but unregarding strangers about her. 



THE BRIDE- WIDOW Si 

Not a drone glances her way, and the worker-bees 
go upon their business in seeming unconcern at her 
presence. They do not even trouble themselves to 
feed her, and she is left to forage for herself as best she 
may. A conspiracy of indifference is on the clan — 
all part of a deep design for her education, if she only 
knew it, but singularly damping to the ardours, and 
great ideas of destiny, that gather within her day 
by day. At length the call comes for which all are 
secretly waiting, and, obeying irresistibly, she presses 
out into the light. 

As she stands hesitating, the hot June sun falls 
upon her, laving her in molten gold. The blue sky 
beckons her upward. All the world of colour and 
incense and life calls her to her wooing, and she must 
needs obey. With a little glad flutter of the wings, 
she breaks at last from the scrambling company about 
her, and soars up into the light. 

Warily now she hovers, taking careful stock of her 
home and its surroundings. Then round and round, 
in ever widening and lifting circles, each sweep 
upward giving her a broader view of the world that 
lies beyond. And then away into the blue sky so 
swiftly that no human eye can follow ; yet only 
for a short flight. She is back again now, almost 
before you have missed her, and hurrying, frightened 
at her own audacity, into the old safe gloom of the hive. 

Thus she dallies, to and fro between the sunshine 
and the darkness, each time adventuring a little 
farther into the blue playground of the upper air, 
until at length the inevitable comes to pass. A great 
drone — one of the roistering crowd that fills the bee- 
garden with its hoarse noontide music — spies her, 
and gives instant chase. At sight of him she wheels, 
and darts away into the sunshine at lightning speed. 
Yet the first drone has hardly stretched a wing before 
another is after him, and still another. Thick and 
fast from all points they gather for the race, until the 
fleeing queen has drawn a whole bevy of them, stream- 
ing like a little grey cloud behind her. This much 



82 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

you can see as you strain your eyes in their track ; 
but in a moment quarry and huntsmen have van- 
ished together, volleying, as it seemed, straight up 
into the farthermost skies. 

From her birth to the day when that terrible, 
living cordon closes about her, almost the whole life 
of the queen-bee can be followed step by step. Only 
this one moment of her bridal stands unrevealed, 
and perhaps for ever unrevealable, to human eyes. 
You can picture to yourself the wild chevy-chase 
through the clear June air and sunshine ; you can 
give, in fancy, the prize to the strongest v and the 
fleetest ; but all you will know for certain is that in 
a little while the queen returns to the hive, sobered 
and solitary, trailing behind her infallible evidence 
of her impregnation and the death of the victorious 
drone. She has been the bride of a moment ; now 
she is to be the widow of a lifetime. Henceforward 
her days are to be spent in the twilight cloisters of 
the hive, flying abroad so rarely that many an old 
experienced beeman will say she comes forth only 
once a year when she leads a swarm. But in her body 
now she carries the seed from which will spring up a 
whole nation. Before her marriage-flight she was 
the least considered of all the colony ; now she is 
welcomed home with public ovation ; lauded, fed, 
and fondled ; set up in the high place, a living 
symbol of the tens of thousands unborn. As in 
olden, savage times, the royal festivals had their 
human sacrifices, so this paramount day in the per- 
fected communism of the bee-people must vent its 
rejoicing in slaughter. But it is not tribute of com- 
mon slaves that is now to redden the State-shambles, 
nor will the work fall to the common executioner's 
knife. There are captive queens in the citadel — a 
royal sacrifice ready to hand, and a royal blade 
hungering for the task. Once the queen has proved 
her intrinsic motherhood, and the first few worker- 
eggs have been laid in the comb, the guards will 
stand away from the royal prison-cells and let her 



THE BRIDE-WIDOW 8$ 

wreak her will upon them. It is all very ghastly in a 
miniature way, yet very queenly, as old traditions 
of human queenhood go. She gives over her nursery- 
work gladly enough for a moment, and flies to the 
slaughter, tearing down the prison-doors, and putting 
each clamorous captive fiercely to the sword. 

Apart from this tragic element of sororicide, quickly 
over and soon forgotten in the general rejoicing, there 
is true romance in the early life-story of the Queen 
of the Bees — bridehood, wifehood, widowhood, follow, 
ing hard upon each other, all in the space of a single 
hour. But in the details of her common every day 
life that succeed this tense period, above all in the 
wonderful structure of her body and its functions, 
there is greater romance still. That she has but a 
single commerce with the drone, and thereafter is 
exalted to perpetual fecundity ; that, through her, 
sons and daughters can be given to the hive in just the 
proportion needed for the good of the State, or that 
increase of population can be wholly arrested at will, 
are to be accredited only after sure knowledge. And 
to understand how these results are brought about, 
it is necessary to learn something of the anatomy, 
as well as the manner of fecundation, of the mother- 
bee. 

In the first place, as fertilisation of the one sex by 
the other is usually regarded, the queen-bee is not 
fertilised at all. The vital essence of the drone does 
not penetrate the ovaries of the queen, but passes 
immediately after coition into a receptacle specially 
provided for it, where it is stored, and its effective- 
ness preserved, during nearly the whole lifetime of 
the queen. It has been shown that the virgin queen 
is able to lay eggs from which only drones, or male 
bees, originate. The fecundated queen, however, 
can lay both male and female eggs, and she has the 
power of depositing either kind when and wherever 
she wills. The whole thing, amazing as it is, and 
far-reaching in its results, has, like many other extra- 
ordinary devices in nature, a simple explanation, 



84 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

The gland wherein is stored the male life-essence can 
be opened or closed at the will of the mother-bee, or 
rather, as will be shown, according to circumstances 
that for the moment involuntarily but inexorably 
guide her. When she is brought to the large drone- 
cell, this gland remains shut, and the egg escapes 
without contact with its contents. But at the nar- 
row worker- cells the gland in the oviduct is opened, 
and the egg, in passing, absorbs some of its containing 
germs. Thus only the female bee is born of the union 
of the two parents ; the male bee is the offspring of 
mother alone. 

Of this primal incident, the parthenogenesis, or 
birth of the fully equipped male from the virgin 
female, little more can be said than that it is a well- 
ascertained fact of nature, exemplified in several 
other insects beside the honey-bee. But while we 
are witnessing the part played in the hive by the 
fecundated queen, with her elaborate organism, much 
is to be noted ; and here we really get the master- 
key to the right understanding of the whole system 
of bee-government. It would be an anomaly if the 
highest, most important functions of the State had 
been entrusted solely to the queen, whose feeble in- 
telligence renders her, of all others, least likely to 
execute them properly ; and we find, in fact, that 
no such reliance is placed on her. The worker-bees, 
who take her in charge on her return from her mating- 
flight, henceforth originate her every act and impulse. 
It has already been seen how she is led from cell to 
cell over the combs ; how she is caused to lay, in 
earliest spring, only a few eggs a day, while in the 
summer she may produce several thousand ; and 
how her output may be checked or augmented at 
any point between. Now we are to realise how it 
is all brought about; or, at least, bring conjecture 
as near to certainty as may be with so difficult a 
theme. 

During the first two days of her life as a perfect 
insect, we saw the young virgin queen mingling with 



THE BRIDE- WIDOW 85 

the throng in the hive almost unnoticed, and left to 
seek her own food from the common store like the 
rest. But now that her fecundation has been 
achieved, she has a whole suite of chamber-women, 
whose principal duty is to attend to her nourishment. 
From their mouths they feed her, giving her, in all 
probability, the same rich substance that was ad- 
ministered to her when but a larva in the cell. This 
bee-milk consists mainly of honey and pollen pre- 
digested, but it has been proved that its composition 
can be altered at will by the ministering bees. Addi- 
tions to it are made, either separately, or combined 
in varying proportions, from three or four distinct 
glands, each of which exudes a liquid differing in 
nature from that of the rest. The particular kind of 
nourishment given to a queen who is to be urged on 
in the work of egg-laying, has the effect of stimulating 
her ovaries. The more food of this kind she receives, 
the greater will be her prolificacy. On the other 
hand, a diminishing allowance will mean a corre- 
sponding decrease in her egg-laying powers; while, 
if this rich diet be withheld altogether, and she is 
forced to help herself from the honey-cells, the de- 
velopment of these eggs may cease entirely, as it 
actually does in the coldest time of the year. Thus 
the bees play upon her, producing just the music 
needed for their purposes. As the days lengthen, 
and the spring sun gets higher and warmer, they 
gradually waken her docile nature to its one para- 
mount task. In the flaming weeks of summer she 
sits at an unending banquet. And when autumn 
comes, with its chilly nights and steadily failing sun- 
glow, the generous fare is slowly withdrawn ; her 
retinue thins and disperses ; at length she becomes 
a solitary, unmarked wanderer again, sipping, with 
the commonest worker, at the plain household sweets. 
How the proportion of the sexes is so unerringly 
regulated by the hive-authorities through their influ- 
ence on the mother-bee, is not so readily explained ; 
nor can it be at present more than shrewd conjecture^ 



m THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

a backward reckoning from effect to cause. Prob- 
ably the opening or closing of the fertilising gland, 
which decides the sex of the egg, is automatic, the 
attitude of the mother-bee during oviposition deter- 
mining its action. When she enters the narrow 
worker-cells, her body is necessarily straightened, 
and this may produce pressure on the fecundating 
gland, resulting in the impregnation of the egg. But 
in the wider drone-cell no such constricted posture is 
needful, and the egg may therefore pass untouched 
by the fructifying germ. If this version of the matter 
be accepted, the natural inference is that either the 
mother-bee is incapable of laying female eggs in the 
cells specially constructed for raising queens — these 
being the largest of all — or that there is something 
in the peculiar curve of the cell-cup which compels 
her to straighten her body in the act, and so brings 
about the same posture as with the narrow worker- 
cells. 

This theory, although at present the most plau- 
sible, has received, it is true, little confirmation in 
fact. No one, apparently, has ever seen the mother- 
bee lay in a queen-cell, nor has the transportation 
thither of a worker-egg by the bees actually been 
witnessed. To cling to the old idea of the supremacy 
of the queen-bee, giving her the power and ability 
of a despotic, all-wise sovereign, would, of course, 
set this and many other vexed questions at rest. 
Nothing, however marvellous, would be too much 
to expect of her. But the farther the student of 
bee-life goes in his absorbing subject, the more im- 
possible the old notion seems. Proof comes to him 
with every hour that the mother-bee is virtually a 
servant, and never a ruler in the hive; and just 
as assured testimony reaches him of the universal 
potency of the worker-bees. All else that takes 
place within the hive is brought about by their 
collective will and agency ; and it would be strange 
indeed if this vital matter of progeneration were not 
subject to the same controlling force. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE 

WATCHING the inner life of the hive in the season 
of its full activity, it is not the untiring spirit 
of industry pervading the whole bee-commonwealth 
that most excites the student's wonder, but rather 
the fact that this ceaseless diligence finds so many 
outlets— that so many different kinds of necessary 
work are going forward at one and the same time. 

Between the brood-combs the nurses are feeding 
the young larvae, or clearing out the empty cells, 
or sealing over the full-grown nymphs for their pre- 
natal slumber. Hard by, the sowers are at their 
vital work, driving their living seed-barrow, the 
queen, over the combs. Elsewhere the wax-makers 
hang in a silent, densely packed cluster. Overhead 
the new honey-combs are growing; the mason& 
building up the cell-walls, while the engineers devist 
means and ends, calculate strains, put in a strut 
here, a stay there, or flying buttress from one comb 
to another, or cut new passage-ways where the 
traffic seems too congested for the old thoroughfares 
of the hive. 

On all sides the scavenging bees go to and fro, 
picking up every particle of refuse, and carrying it 
safely away. Winged undertakers drive their trade 
in the midst of the throng, bearing the corpses of their 
comrades, old and young, towards the entrance, and 
flying away with them into the sunlight of the young 
spring day. There is the ventilating army outside 
the city gates, skilfully organised in relays, so that, 
day and night, a constant circulation of air is main- 
tained. There are the guard-bees close by, watch- 
ing all in-comers and out-goers. There is a sort 
of General Purposes Committee ready outside the 
threshold with a helping hand for all : succouring 
the overladen, grooming down any in need of such 
assistance, gathering up fallen treasure, or, as it 

87 



83 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

would seem, taking careful note of the weather for 
their next official report. And all through the hours 
of sunshine, in unnumbered thousands, the foragers 
are charging to and fro, some bringing nectar, some 
staggering in under mighty loads of pollen, others 
with full water-sacs, still more dragging behind 
them lumps of the curious cement called by the 
ancients Propolis, and used for so many different 
purposes in the daily work of the hive. 

And it all goes on with the regularity of a well- 
ordered human settlement. There is complexity, 
yet no confusion ; there is speed without hurry. 
Each busy gang of labourers has apparently a 
distinct and definite task allotted to it by the central 
hive-authority ; co-operation and progress are, to 
all appearances, deified cause and effect in all the 
affairs of the hive. 

It is easy — nay, inevitable — in any close study of 
bee-life with the help of the modern observation- 
hive, to overset the ancient idea of absolute bee- 
monarchy under a single king or queen. But it is 
not so easy to determine how the general govern- 
ment of the colony is actually carried on. Innu- 
merable small consultations on minor matters are 
seen to take place on every side during each moment 
of the busy day ; but nothing like general communi- 
cation is ever visible. And yet, how are the great 
national movements, such as the despatch of a 
swarm or the supersedure of an old queen, brought 
about ; how are the various common crises of the 
State met, and provided for ? The only rational 
inference seems to be that each worker is in herself 
the perfect evolved presentment of republicanism, 
in whom all imaginable difficulties in collective life 
have their best solution, tried and proved through 
the ages, and resorted to unerringly as a matter of 
course. Thus a common need is felt, and met in- 
stantaneously by a common, recognised expedient. 
The judgment of one is necessarily the judgment of 
all. Every problem of daily life, however intricate, 



THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE 89 

is solved by the one device, brought to the fine point 
of perfection through the experience of countless 
generations, and applied by each individual to the 
common want, just as hunger impels all mankind 
to eat. 

Such a condition of affairs, even in a community 
of human beings, would imply a very high state of 
mental, if not of moral, development in the indi- 
vidual. It would mean entire negation of self in the 
interest of the common good. Even with all the 
forces of heredity at work, it would need stern ascetic 
training for the young, and for the transgressing adult 
a swift and merciless retribution, if the last dream of 
communism — the abolition of all law and penalty, 
and the establishment of a natural autonomy of well- 
doing — were ever to be realised in fact. And yet 
some such state of things appears to exist in the 
bee-commonwealth : the individual worker-bee seems 
to be the product of some such system carried on 
through an indefinite space of time. Order is pre- 
served, public works go diligently forward, the clock 
of the national progress keeps time to the second, not 
because there is a central wisdom-force to plan, to 
govern, to awe recalcitrants, but because every 
worker-bee is herself the State in miniature, all 
propensities alien to the pure collective spirit having 
been long ago bred out of her by the sheer necessities 
of her case. 

The worker-bee, as we see her in the hive to-day, 
although evolution must have been busy through the 
ages determining her present mind-power and bodily 
conformation, is nevertheless as much a product of 
direct artifice as she is of original nature. We have 
seen how the egg containing the feminine germ, if 
given full scope and opportunity, develops into what 
may be taken as the complete aboriginal type of 
female bee, differing from the worker in a dozen 
essential ways. The queen also is probably, in one 
respect at least — her amazing fecundity — a deliberate 
creation of the hive-people, as her over-production is 



po THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

brought about by over-stimulation to meet an artifi- 
cial state of affairs. Left to herself, under pristine 
conditions, she would certainly lay on a much more 
moderate scale. But the worker-bee owes her unique 
structure and mental constitution almost entirely to 
the intervention of her nurses from the moment of the 
hatching of the egg. Careful experiment has proved 
that the queen-larva and the worker-larva are iden- 
tical up to the third day of their life in the cell, except 
that the queen has made more rapid growth owing 
to more generous and more ample fare. After the 
third day, the genital system of each larva will begin 
to develop, if this rich nitrogenous diet is maintained. 
In the case of the queen, this pre-digested food, well 
called bee-milk, is lavished on the favoured grub up 
to the last moment of its larval existence, no other 
food being given. But in the case of the worker-grub, 
not only has its supply of bee-milk been restricted in 
both quantity and quality from the day of its birth, 
but now — just before the development of the ovaries 
might be expected — an important change is made. 
The allowance of bee-milk is greatly reduced, while 
plain honey is given in addition, but on the same 
parsimonious scale, to the end of its five days* larval 
life. 

What other influences, if any, are brought to bear 
on the young worker-bee at this portentous stage of 
her career, it is impossible to say. But at least the 
change in the food is well ascertained, and the results 
— whether of this alone, or in combination with other 
treatment — are more than astounding. Not only is 
the development of the sex-organs so completely 
arrested that hardly a trace of them can be discovered 
in the adult worker-bee, but, from that moment, the 
larva seems to become an essentially different creature, 
reflecting more and more the attributes of her nurses, 
and showing wider and wider departure from those 
of the mother-bee. As soon as the worker changes 
into the pupa state, organs appear of which the 
queen has not the faintest rudiments. She receives 



THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE 91 

her special equipment for field-work in a pair of 
baskets for carrying pollen. Her tongue is lengthened, 
so that it may reach the nectar hidden deep down in 
the clover-bells. She is to become a builder, and 
therefore is provided with half a dozen crucibles 
wherein to prepare the wax. Her useless ovipositor is 
changed into a weapon : it is straightened, shortened ; 
the barbs upon it are multiplied and strengthened ; a 
gland, with which it is furnished, and which, in the 
queen, contains an all but harmless fluid, is now 
filled with an active poison. Above all, she develops 
a brain-power far in excess of that of the normal 
female bee, her mother ; and she acquires a whole 
new set of impulses and aspirations from beginning 
to end. 

While the queen-bee's natural element is the ob- 
scurity of the hive, and she would seem both to hate 
and fear the sunshine, the worker is essentially an 
outdoor creature, revelling in the light and air. While 
the queen, though obedient to the destiny that has 
made her over-fruitful, displays nevertheless not the 
slightest joy of motherhood nor interest in her chil- 
dren, the worker, doomed to eternal spinsterhood, yet 
constitutes herself the true mother and nurse and 
instructress of all the young in the hive. And the 
price exacted for the authority and power which she 
usurps, or was usurped for her by those remote an- 
cestors of hers who first invented the sexless honey- 
bee, must be paid in the hardest coin — that of life 
itself. Instead of the years that nature allotted to 
her kind in the beginning, she is to endure hardly as 
many months. Destiny, and her own vaulting ambi- 
tions, have given her too arduous a part to play. Her 
stunted, yet over-elaborated body and over-developed 
brain, cannot long hold out against the wear and tear 
of the life she is born to. At best a few months see 
her dead at her work, or using the last pulsations of 
her worn-out, ragged wings to carry her away to the 
traditional burial-place of the hive ; or her end may 
be to fall under the stroke of the State executioners. 



92 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

For the old-age problem has long ago discovered its 
effective solution in the bee-republic. Justice that 
is capable of being tempered with mercy carries its 
own mark of imperfection indelibly upon it. When 
the principle of all for the common good has been 
driven to its last resort in logic, mercy to the indi- 
vidual can only be another name for robbing Peter 
to pay Paul. In bee-communism the sole title to life 
is utility, and so the old worn-out, useless workers 
must go. 

The development of the worker-egg through its 
various stages of growth, until the perfectly^ formed 
insect emerges from the cell, makes a curious study. 
The egg itself is remarkable, for it is covered with an 
hexagonal pattern. The large compound eyes of the 
fully grown bee also show this form. Each eye con- 
sists of about four thousand separate lenses, and each 
lens is a regular hexagon. Wonder has often been 
expressed at the ingenuity of the comb-builders in 
making the cells six-sided, and thus crowding into 
a given space more compartments than could be 
secured by the same amount of material wrought into 
any other shape. The ancient writers explained this 
choice of the hexagonal cell by the supposed fact that 
the six legs of the bee were simultaneously employed 
in comb-building, each leg constructing its own por- 
tion of the cell. A more modern idea is that the par- 
ticular shape of the cell is accidental, or rather the 
outcome of compelling circumstance, mutual pressure 
causing the cells to assume the hexagonal form. 

Now, it is quite true that soaked peas in a bottle 
will take this shape in swelling, but the analogy will 
not hold good in respect of comb-building. In the 
work of the bees there is no pressure or constriction 
of any kind. Each cell is made separately, being 
joined on to those above it ; and the comb expands 
steadily downward and sideways through an empty 
space until the desired limit is reached. A much more 
probable explanation of the hexagonal form of the 
cell is that it was arrived at by experience. The first 



THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE 93 

combs may have been built with round cells, the inter- 
stices being filled in with wax. But the bee, who is 
an expert in the science of economy, would quickly 
see the disadvantage of this plan. And with the 
hexagonal principle an old familiar thing in the hive 
— witness the pattern on the egg-surfaces, and the 
eye-construction — it would not be long before she hit 
upon the better, more scientific way. 

There is, however, another reason, and almost as 
potent a one, for the adoption of the six-sided cell 
both for brood-raising and the storing of honey. It 
must be remembered that the present system of ver- 
tical walls parallel and close together, made up of 
numberless small horizontal chambers placed back 
to back, is not an ideal arrangement either for the 
raising of the young or the storing of food. Yet it is 
the best possible contrivance under the circumstances, 
which are forced upon the bee by the necessity of lead- 
ing a close, crowded, communal life. Air is a prime 
need for all operations in the hive, but for none more 
than the development of the young bees. When a 
queen is to be raised, a full supply of fresh air is given 
her, but only at the expense of valuable space. With 
the common kind, of which perhaps ten or fifteen 
thousand may be maturing in the brood-nest at one 
and the same time, it is obviously impossible to make 
any such concession. The young worker- or drone- 
larva must secure what air it can through the narrow 
cell- top. Now, the bee breathes at all stages of its 
career not through the mouth, but by means of air- 
holes or spiracles in the sides of its body. If the cell 
were round, the larva, when fairly grown, would fill 
the space, and the air would reach the spiracles only 
with difficulty. But, no matter what the size of the 
young grub may be, the angles of the hexagon cell are 
never quite filled. They form half a dozen by-passes 
for the air, arranged on all sides, and extending right 
to the base of the cell ; and thus the larva has the full 
benefit of the available air-supply, even though it be 
necessarily scanty. 



94 



THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



With the store-combs the six angles of the cell 
fulfil an equally important office. The ideal honey- 
cell would be one with its mouth opening upwards, 
so that it could be filled in an ordinary rational way. 
But under the strict economical principles ruling in 
the hive such an arrangement would be impracticable. 
The honey-vats must be stacked one over the other 
in a horizontal position, and therefore must be charge- 
able from the end. All cells in the comb have a 
slight upward tilt, but not enough to retain the fluid 
contents if the cell were a round one. The effect of 
the angles in the hexagon is to increase the retentive 
property of the cell, and experience has taught the 
bees how to supplement this natural holding power 
of the angles by just that slight cant of the cell 
which is necessary to prevent the nectar running 
out. 

The worker-bee, during her period of larval life, 
at first lies coiled up at the bottom of the cell, but 
as her size increases she takes up a position length- 
ways, with her head towards the cell-mouth. This, 
however, is not a constant attitude, for she seems at 
intervals to make a series of slow gyrations or somer- 
saults, probably to facilitate the casting of her skin, 
which she accomplishes several times during her five 
days' life as a grub. At the end of this time the 
nurse-bees stop the feeding process and seal up the 
cell. Now the larva sets to work, first to spin herself 
a silken garment before entering on her long sleep as a 
chrysalis, and then to change her skin for the last 
time. In the case of the worker these fine-wrought 
pleeping-clothes envelop her whole body, forming a 
continuous cocoon. But the queen-larva weaves 
herself only a scanty sort of cloak, covering her head 
and thorax, but leaving her nether portions bare. 
The theory usually advanced in explanation of this 
is, that when the surplus queens are slaughtered in 
their cells by the accepted mother-bee after her 
fertilisation, the fell work is rendered easier by the 
absence of the tough material of the cocoon over the 



THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE 95 

parts generally attacked. It seems to be well sub- 
stantiated that in a battle of queens the stings are 
not used haphazard, as with the workers, but each 
queen tries to thrust her weapon into one of her 
enemy's spiracles or breathing-holes, of which she 
possesses fourteen, seven on each side. And a stroke 
dealt in this way appears to be always fatal. 

But, in all likelihood, the true reason why the 
queen sleeps in a short gown made of tough, coarse 
fibre must be looked for somewhere back in the old 
ancestral history of the honey-bee. It is probably 
safe to consider the complete worker cocoon as a 
comparatively recent introduction, evolved to meet 
some necessity arising since the bee-people became 
a civilised race. But what its true origin was appears 
to be out of the reach of all conjecture. A curious 
fact is that these cocoons are never removed from 
the cell. They remain fixed to its sides throughout, 
and though the cell is otherwise carefully cleaned 
after the young bee has vacated it, the cocoon is 
never interfered with, but continues as a permanent 
lining to the cell. The same thing occurs with all 
successive generations, each bee leaving her swad- 
dling-clothes behind her, until so great an accumula- 
tion occurs that the cell becomes too small for breeding 
any but a puny, undersized race. With wild bees, 
where the nest has been constructed in a tree-hollow, 
and there is usually plenty of surplus room, the old 
brood-combs may be eventually abandoned and fresh 
ones built farther on. Thus the stock generally shifts 
its station from year to year. These natural bee- 
nests, or bee-bikes, as country people call them, often 
reach a great age. Sometimes a swarm will get under 
the rafters in a house-roof, and may be left undis- 
turbed for generations. In one case bees were 
traditionally supposed to have inhabited a blind loft 
in a farm-house continuously for forty or fifty years. 
A legend rife in the village credited them with having 
stored many tons of honey, but when the stock was 
sulphured little more than a vast accumulation of 



g6 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

comb was discovered. This comb was of all ages, 
from a few weeks old to an unconjecturable number 
of years. Much of it was perfectly black, and the 
cells choked up with pupa cocoons. 

The fact that egg-laying is continued in these 
combs where others are not available, even though 
the capacity of the cells has been greatly reduced, 
seems to cast an added doubt on the theory that the 
size of the cell is responsible for the fertilisation or 
non-fertilization of the egg as it is deposited by the 
queen. Very old drone-comb is sometimes found in 
use for breeding purposes where the cells have become 
no larger than those used for normal worker-brood. 
And yet the queen continues to lay in them un- 
impregnated eggs. The whole question is still hedged 
round with difficulties. 

The young worker-bee, at the end of about three 
weeks from its first inception, breaks from its 
chrysalis-skin, and begins to gnaw its way through 
the cell-cover. The pollen, which is combined with 
the wax to form this capping, discharges a double 
office. It makes the wax porous for the admittance 
of air, and it renders the cell-cover edible, thus 
causing the young bee to effect its own release through 
the promptings of its appetite. The new-born 
worker, although fully grown, is a weak, greyish- 
hued, flaccid creature for some time after it leaves 
its cradle. Its earliest impulse seems to be to groom 
itself, and then to wander about on a tour of in- 
spection of its as yet narrow world of gloom and 
noise and bustle. For the first day or two it does 
little else than crawl about unnoticed in the busy 
throng, gradually gaining strength and rigidity of 
limb. On the second day it may be seen dipping 
into the open honey-vats and pollen-bins, of which 
a few are always scattered here and there among the 
brood-cells. After this it seems to waken in earnest 
to its duties and responsibilities, and takes its place 
among the nurse-bees, setting to work with the rest 
in the stupendous task of feeding the larvae. 



THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE 97 

In the ordinary course, the young worker-bee will 
not leave the hive for about a fortnight after its 
emergence from the cell. In the interval, however, it 
has a whole policy of life to study, and several trades 
to learn. All the indoor work of the hive appears to 
be done by the young bees during these first weeks of 
their existence. On them the whole care and susten- 
ance of the young brood depend. They produce the 
wax, and build the combs ; they look after the order 
and cleanliness of the hive ; they are the brewers of 
the honey, and the keepers of the stores ; they feed 
the queen-bee on her ceaseless rounds, and also give 
the drones their daily rations of bee-milk, for it is 
certain that the male bees depend very largely on the 
workers in this way, drawing only a part of their diet 
from the common stores. The old bees are the 
foragers ; but it is probable they are met by the 
younger ones soon after their return to the hive, and 
their burden of nectar, being regurgitated, is trans- 
ferred to the pouches of the young bees, by whom it is 
carried to the store-combs in the upper regions of the 
hive. At least, if the storage-chamber of a hive be 
opened during the busy part of the day, hardly any 
old bees will be seen among the crowd which is in- 
dustriously rilling the cells with the new-gathered 
sweets. 

It is not until the beginning of the second week of 
their life that the young bees make their first essay in 
the open air, and then it is only for a few minutes 
during the hottest part of the day. This sudden 
midday uproar is a familiar experience to the bee- 
keeper during the late spring and summer ; and 
although the drones at first contribute largely to the 
chorus, they soon fly away, while the singing cloud of 
bees which remains enveloping every hive at this 
time, is entirely composed of the young house-bees 
taking their daily brief allowance of exercise and air. 

It is found that the glands necessary for the pro- 
duction of the brood-food, as also the wax-genera- 
ting organs, are largely developed in bees only a few 



98 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

weeks old, while, after their first month of life is 
over, these organs are greatly reduced. The bee 
generally begins outdoor work as a forager soon after 
she has reached the age of fourteen days. It is, 
however, probably a week or two longer before she 
attempts the more serious business of nectar-gather- 
ing. Nearly all the pollen-bearers are bees in their 
first young strength and vigour, and therefore 
peculiarly adapted to the carrying of heavy burdens. 
But as soon as the worker-bee has settled down to the 
great paramount task of honey-getting, she seems 
to leave the pollen alone. Thus, in a normal colony, 
the life of the honey-bee, short as it is, is carefully 
planned out from beginning to end, each period 
having its special task for which the age of the bee 
is peculiarly fitted. Yet this rule is no more absolute 
than any other of the ways of the hive. Where the 
community is short-handed, and there are not enough 
mature workers to gather stores, the young bees will 
be turned out to forage at a much earlier date in 
their career. In the same way, if a hive has been 
without a queen for some time, and therefore few 
young bees are available to care for the brood when 
the new mother-bee has at last established herself, 
many of the old workers will stay at home and 
busy themselves with the nursery-work, which in 
the ordinary course they would have long since 
relinquished. 

There are many such instances of ingenious 
makeshift, or special adaptation, in the ways of the 
honey-bee. She is a creature full of resource on 
emergencies, but it is in the provision of desperate 
remedies for really desperate ills that she shines at 
her brightest. The prime disaster in bee-life is the 
loss of a queen at a time when it is impossible to 
appoint a successor. The standard of intelligence, 
as well as that of character, varies among bees almost 
as much as it does among men. Some colonies will 
work harder and for longer hours than the rest. 
Others will ease off when they have put by what they 



THE SOVEREIGN WORKER-BEE 99 

consider a sufficiency of stores, and an idle spirit 
spreads visibly among them. In a few cases there is 
a distinct moral twist in the national character, and 
the bees take to robbing their neighbours' larders 
instead of working to furnish their own. 

Permanent queenlessness is a calamity which affects 
different colonies in different ways. With some it 
means complete despair, a cessation of all enterprise 
or interest in life. Work is stopped ; the guards are 
withdrawn from the gate ; the community seems to 
give up in a body, and to await extinction with no 
more hope than a batch of criminals in the condemned 
cell. But with others the common disaster is but a 
signal for a universal quickening of wits, a furbishing- 
up of all possible and impossible resources. To bees 
of this temper we should look for such episodes as the 
egg-purloining to supply a queen-cell, which has been 
already dealt with. But for supreme ingenuity, even 
though it be the forlornest of forlorn hopes, perhaps 
there is nothing to equal a device sometimes resorted 
to in this last emergency. 

Looking through a hive which is not only without 
a queen, but which is without any means of raising 
one, certain mysterious eggs are unexpectedly dis- 
covered. These eggs are obviously quite newly laid, 
but not in the orthodox way. A normal queen works 
consistently from cell to cell, over a fairly regular 
patch of comb, and deposits only one egg in each cell ; 
but these eggs in the queenless hive have been laid in 
a curiously haphazard way. The eggs are straggled 
over the comb. Two or three cells have been fur- 
nished at one spot and a few more at another, without 
the slightest attempt at the usual order and system. 
Moreover, some cells contain single eggs, but others 
two, or even three, apiece. It looks as if some de- 
mented mother-bee from another hive had ca ight 
her keepers napping, and had made surreptitious 
excursion into the queenless stock. But the most 
careful search through the hive will reveal no queen, 
nor is one to be found. The explanation of the vagary 



ioo THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

is that one of the workers has, in some extraordinary 
way, succeeded in rousing her atrophied nature, and 
has become capable of laying eggs. Yet the doom of 
the colony is not delayed by this, but rather hastened ; 
for these eggs will produce only drones, and thus still 
more useless mouths to feed. In one well- authen- 
ticated case, the bees of a queenless colony built a 
queen-cell, and actually transplanted to it one of these 
eggs laid by a fertile worker, a dead drone being after- 
wards found in the cell. 

How the laying worker is produced under the spur 
of the national crisis can only be a matter for specula- 
tion, but probably the youngest bee of the colony is 
plied with the special food usually given to queens, 
and thus her generative faculties are, to a certain 
extent, developed. 



CHAPTER X 

A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY 

THE modern commercial bee-keeper — the man who 
keeps his bees in hives of the most approved 
construction, all alike in colour and shape, and all 
in straight rows—is too prone to look only on the 
practical side of his work, and to regard with a certain 
ill-concealed contempt, anything that does not directly 
promote what is, in his view, the one and only object 
of apiculture, that of honey-getting. 

But with the bee-keeper who is also a bee-lover, 
the tendency is all the other way. To live in the very 
spirit of wonder, as he must who has once dipped 
down below the surface of hive-life, is to saddle but a 
slow, ambling jade for the race in material prosperity. 
In a bee-garden the habit of rumination comes on one 
like creeping paralysis, gradually but irresistibly. It 
is one thing, on a fine June morning, to start away 



A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY 101 

from the house, pipe in mouth and busily trundling 
the honey-barrow, intent on a long day's work among 
the hives ; it is quite another thing to keep indus- 
triously to the task hour after hour, when the sun has 
fixed his slothful golden grip upon you, and the 
drowsy song of the bees has worked its will on heart 
and mind. 

Good resolutions have a way of petering out, 
reasonably enough, under these inviting circum- 
stances. The honey-barrow makes the most com- 
fortable seat in the world, and can be pulled up just 
where the shade of the linden- trees is thickest. More- 
over, the blue smoke of tobacco, drifting lazily up 
through the sunshine, adds just that touch of delibera- 
tion needed in a scene where all is unmitigated, almost 
desperate toil; while what difference can it make if 
one alone be idle in the hundred thousand ? And so, 
as often as not, the creaking wheel comes permanently 
to rest under the lindens ; the honey is left to the 
honey-makers ; the thoughts follow the bees into their 
hives, or may-be wend away over seas to the great 
plantations, where the dry weed filling the pipe-bowl 
was once a green leaf in an ocean of green, flecked over 
with blossom, and sung over by bees, whose ancestors 
might have come from this very nook in old England, 
where it is now all ending in smoke and quiet 
thought. 

But, especially on rainy days, when there is much 
to do indoors — preparing the section-racks, discharg- 
ing the honey from the full combs that, empty, they 
may be returned to the hives for refilling on the 
morrow, and what not — the tendency to set aside 
obvious, humdrum duties in beemanship has a still 
more capable ally. 

The beeman with a microscope has given the seven- 
leagued boots to his conscience ; he will never catch 
up with it again in a whole life's march. If the daily 
work in the hive, as seen with the naked eye, is a 
fascinating, duty-dispersing study, a microscopic 
acquaintance with the hive-worker herself, and the 



102 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

details of her extraordinary equipment, lets one into 
a whole new world of fact and thought. 

It is only under a strong glass that the true place 
of the honey-bee in the scale of creation can be entirely 
estimated. Her work is evident to the most casual 
eye, but of the worker herself we get only a vague 
idea of a dim-hued, crystal-winged atom running a 
perpetual race with the wind and sunshine, or forming 
an all but undistinguishable speck in the seething, 
heaving multitudes within the hive. 

But here, on the stage of the microscope, the honey- 
bee is revealed as a totally new creature ; and, by 
little and little, a story unfolds itself about her which, 
in its way, is a perfect epic of life. No one can study 
the perplexities of hive-life for long without a con- 
viction that a creature executing such varied and 
elaborate works must, of necessity, be herself highly 
developed in body and mind. But it seldom happens, 
even with the veriest tiro, that the expectation comes 
anywhere near the reality in such an examination of 
the common worker-bee. The unaided eye sees a 
creature, fashioned simply enough to all appearances 
— a brown, attenuated body, two pairs of wings, the 
usual six legs common to all insects, and a couple of 
bent horns, like threshels, that continuously waver 
to and fro. But under the glass this simplicity at 
once vanishes. From the tip of her antennae to the 
barbed end of her sting, there is nothing about the 
honey-bee that is not made on the most bewilderingly 
complicated plan. 

Watching a hive at work on a busy day in summer, 
the attention is first drawn to the pollen-gatherers, 
labouring in by the thousand with the big, oval, 
brightly-coloured masses fixed to their hindmost legs ; 
and it is first to the pollen-carrying organism that the 
glass is now naturally directed. The six legs, which 
looked all very much alike to the naked eye, are seen 
to be in three pairs, and the construction of each pair 
differs very markedly from that of its fellows. So far 
from their being simple legs, each has no fewer than 



I 



A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY 103 

nine jointed parts, and nearly every part carries a 
special piece of mechanism necessary and vital in the 
daily work of the bee. Whole treatises might be 
written on the functions of the human hand, yet the 
hand is a very simple contrivance compared with the 
legs of the honey-bee. The pollen-carrying device is 
on the thigh of the hind leg. The thigh is broadened 
out and hollowed, and round this oblong cavity is a 
fringe of incurving bristles which look as if they would 
hold anything. But before the pollen can be packed 
in these baskets it must be collected and kneaded to- 
gether. Practically the whole body of the bee is used 
in pollen-gathering. Under the low power of the 
microscope it is seen that hardly any part of the 
trunk or limb is without its dense covering of hairs ; 
but with the high objective these hairs cease to be 
hairs, and are changed into actual feathers, delicate 
herring-bone implements, which sweep up the pollen 
as the bee dives into the flower-cup for the nectar that 
lies below. 

Nearly every joint of each leg is furnished with 
a comb of bristles, with which this pollen-dust is 
scraped off and transferred to the carrying-basket 
after being moistened by the tongue ; while the hind- 
legs have each a complete, perfectly-fashioned curry- 
comb. Here the leg is widened and flattened, and 
covered on one side with nine or ten rows of short, 
strong spines, with which the bee scrapes her body 
just as a groom curry-combs a horse. At ordinary 
times she will carefully pack her load of pollen into 
its proper receptacles before returning to the hive, so 
that it shall be all ready for transference to the cells. 
At the cell-mouth she pushes each lump off by means 
of her other legs, leaving it to be rammed down into 
the cell by the store-keepers. No distinction is made 
here, every kind and colour of pollen being indiscrimi- 
nately stored in the same cell ; and when the cell is 
full, a thin layer of honey is smeared over all, to pre- 
serve it from the air. When, however, time presses, 
the bee will not stop to knead up the load, but will 



104 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

carry it home as it is, arriving in the hive smothered 
completely from head to foot as with gold-dust. Then 
the house-bees gather round her, soon scraping her 
free of her encumbrance, and she starts off again for 
another load. 

The fact that insects can walk on both upper and 
under surfaces apparently with equal ease, is none 
the less remarkable because we see it going on every 
day of our lives. Yet the fly, crawling up the window- 
glass, or running about on the ceiling, owes his power 
of topsy-turvy perambulation to a very ingenious 
device. This is well illustrated in the foot of a 
bee. She has a pair of short, strong double claws, 
which will take her securely over all but the smoothest 
and shiniest surfaces ; and it is with these claws that 
bees form themselves into dense clusters and knots 
and cables within the hive, holding hand-to-hand, 
as it were, in all directions. But when there is iiothing 
for the claw to hold by, another part of the foot comes 
into play. This is a soft, flexible pad, which is always 
covered by a thick, oily exudation. In walking, the 
bee puts her feet down three at a time, the pads ad- 
hering instantly they come into contact with the 
smooth surface. At the next step the other three 
pads come into play, while the first three are stripped 
off. But each foot is capable of attaching and detach- 
ing itself independently of its fellows. In this case 
the stripping is accomplished by downward pressure 
of the claws of the same foot. 

On each of her fore-legs the bee has an appliance 
which fulfils a very important office. It is a semi- 
circular notch with a fringe of strong hairs, and when 
the leg is bent up, this notch engages with a curious 
projection on the next upper pint, forming an eyelet 
roughly circular in shape. With this exact and special 
tool she cleans her antennae, and this is done at short 
intervals throughout the whole active time of her life, 
much as, in the operation of blinking, the human eye 
is kept cleansed. The tongue also is freed from ad- 
hering grains of pollen by this device. 



A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY 105 

The question, How does a bee gather the flower- 
juices to make her honey ? is met by certain popular 
naturalists with the assurance that she sucks them 
through a tube. This is so easy a generalisation that 
it amounts very nearly to positive error. The tongue 
of the bee is not a tube, as the word is usually under- 
stood. And she laps up the nectar as often as she 
sucks it. It depends entirely on the quantity to be 
dealt with ; and a little careful dissection of the 
mouth-parts of the bee, by means of the microscope 
and a pair of fine needles, will soon make the whole 
matter clear. 

She is no beauty — the honey-bee, seen at such 
close quarters ; unending toil, and a perverted, baffled 
nature, do not tend to loveliness in any of her sex. 
But her positive and almost terrifying ugliness, when 
looked at so disadvantageously, is soon forgotten as 
one comes to realise her abounding possession of that 
other kind of beauty — the beauty of utility. 

To the naked eye her tongue is a bright brown, 
shining piece, protruding from her mouth, and hang- 
ing down with much the same appearance as an 
elephant's trunk. Under the microscope it is soon 
seen that this is not a tongue in the proper sense, 
but a continuation of the under-lip. It consists of 
six or seven different parts capable of being fitted 
together lengthways. There is a central part, longer 
than the rest, with a hairy spatula at its end, and 
when the other parts are closed about this, the whole 
virtually forms a tube within a tube. The spatula 
does the lapping when only minute quantities of 
fluid have to be taken up, and these pass into the 
mouth more by capillary attraction than by actual 
sucking ; but when there is a brimming cup of nectar 
to be emptied, the whole mechanism of the tongue is 
brought into play. The longitudinal strips are placed 
together edge to edge, and the liquid is drawn out of 
the flower-cup by the action of the tongue-muscles 
in much the same way as water is lifted by a 
pump. 






io6 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

Now that we have the head of the bee under 
observation, many curious things about it can be 
ascertained. The strong, curved jaws, working side- 
ways, are doubly interesting as the main implements 
used in the preparation of the wax, and largely in the 
comb-building, But the eyes and the long, flail-like 
antennae rivet attention first. Whether the bee was 
made for her life, or the life — imposed on her by 
inexorable conditions — made the bee what she is 
to-day, the extraordinary adaptation of her physique 
to her environment is beyond all question. The 
great compound eyes, with their thousands of facets 
each pointing in a slightly different direction, are 
obviously made for wide and distant outlooks. It is 
with these eyes that the bee finds her way out and 
home over miles of country. In the worker the 
compound eyes occupy the whole sides of the head, 
but in the drone they are much larger, and meet 
entirely at the top. Thus, dallying in the sunshine, 
he is able the while to keep the whole arc of the sky 
under scrutiny, ready at an instant's notice to take 
up the love-challenge of the young queens. 

But these large multiple eyes of the bee are of little 
use to her at close quarters, or in the deep twilight of 
the hive. For indoor use, and for near vision, she 
has three other eyes, containing a single lens each, 
and set in her forehead just above her antennae. The 
popular belief, that the honey-bee carries on her busy 
life, and elaborate enterprises in complete darkness, is 
mainly a fallacy. Probably there is always some 
light, even in the remotest recesses of the hive — 
enough, at least, for the eyes of the bee, if not for our 
own vision. 

The bee, however, would seem to depend very little 
on sight alone in the prosecution of her various tasks. 
There is little doubt that she possesses all the other 
four senses in a marked degree. Both the tongue and 
the lips have certain highly developed structures 
upon them which can be nothing else than organs of 
taste ; while the most superficial acquaintance with 



A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY 107 

the life of the hive must convince anyone that the 
bee possesses the senses of smell and hearing, and 
that very acutely. Where the seat of these two 
faculties lies is at present doubtful, and the exact 
functions of the antennae are still a matter of con- 
jecture. But it is at least certain that these latter 
perform vital office in every act or enterprise of the 
bee. It is obvious that the antennae are very delicate 
organs of touch, but it is equally obvious that they 
are much more than this. It has been ascertained 
that they carry no less than six totally different kinds 
of instruments, each of which must have its distinct 
use. 

Observation of the ways of the honey-bee has been 
carried on for thousands of years. More books have 
been written about the bee than perhaps of all other 
creatures put together. And yet our knowledge of 
her powers and organisation must still be reckoned in 
its infancy. The microscopists have dissected her 
antennae and isolated all their various parts, but of 
the particular functions of these little or nothing is 
known at present. There are certain hairs, evenly 
distributed over the whole surface, which are pre- 
sumably instruments of touch. But there are other 
hairs, or fine cones, which are hollow, enclosing a 
delicate nerve-fibre ; hairs set loosely in a cavity • 
hairs curved and ringed, and of different lengths. 
Then there are mysterious pits and depressions, either 
open or covered with incredibly thin membranes, 
enshrining nerve-ends only just visible with the 
highest objectives. And the whole is linked up in an 
intricate nervous system that baffles every art and 
patience of research ; while, when all has been inves- 
tigated and described, no one is really any the 
wiser. 

The antennae are certainly touch-organs, and, in all 
likelihood, it is by their means that the bee hears and 
smells. Yet this only exhausts a few of their manifest 
possibilities. It is quite clear that we must admit 
the honey-bee to possess other senses than the five 



io8 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

we know of ; and — for a guess — some of these 
mysterious implements on her antennae may be 
thought-transmitters and receivers on the wireless 
plan. The wonderful unanimity of action among 
bees may be due to the fact that they can exchange 
ideas through the air, as men have now at last come 
to do. The faculty of speech, hitherto held up as 
man's insignia of lordship over the rest of creation, 
may be indeed a crude, archaic thing, compared with 
the mind-language of the honey-bees. 

There is another conceivable function which the 
antennae of bees may perform — that of unerring and 
instant estimation of short distances. They may 
be delicate measuring instruments, not mechanically 
applied in the way of a foot-rule or metric scale, but 
registering dimensions inherently, as our ears record 
intensity of sound. This would go far to explain how 
honeycomb is built, how the cells are made all of 
the same shape and size, although hundreds of the 
mason-bees are at work on the structure, not only 
at the same moment, but in succession, each bee 
coming and going in the murmurous gloom of the 
hive, and beginning instantly and unhesitatingly 
at the point where her predecessor broke off. As the 
central division of the comb grew, expanding in all 
directions downward, and the cells were built out 
horizontally at the same time, the bee would know 
by her sense of dimension when the limit of each side 
in the hexagonal cell-base was reached, and would 
know the proper angle to turn off at in the laying of 
the next foundation-line. 

Anyone who has watched the flight of the bee must 
have been struck by its sheer facility and freedom 
no less than by its speed. It is quite evident that the 
bee is not only an accomplished aerial navigator, 
but that she sustains and propels herself through the 
air with very little effort. Obviously her equipment 
for flight must be a thoroughly efficient one, and 
yet at first glance it is not quite clear how she 
manages so well. The student of the flight-problem, 



A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY 109 

taking his ideas and conception of first principles 
from the flight of birds, is accustomed to believe that 
there are at least two vital indispensable elements 
in the process— a pair of wings or combination of 
aeroplane and propellers that will sustain as well as 
drive, and some sort of steering-apparatus like the 
bird's tail. Yet, as far as a first general inspection 
carries us, the bee appears to have no rudder-mechan- 
ism at all, but to depend on her four wings for every 
purpose. The wings of the bird have a variable 
action. They can be used together or separately, 
and are as capable of eccentric adjustment, both 
in themselves and in relation to one another, as 
a pair of human arms. But the bee's wings have 
none of this adaptability. They have but the one 
motion, up and down ; and they work symmetri- 
cally, each wing keeping time with its fellow. Yet 
the bee steers herself perfectly well in a hundred 
different evolutions, accomplishing all that the bird 
attains with his more complicated apparatus for 
flight. 

The whole problem is bound up with another 
problem ; and the two, difficult of solution apart, 
easily resolve one another when taken in conjunction. 
Insects are so called because their bodies are in two 
parts, entirely divided except for an extremely 
slender connecting- joint. We are so accustomed 
to accept this arrangement as a common fact in 
nature that we seldom stop to consider its real 
significance. It is not easy to see how such a con- 
struction can be anything else than a drawback 
to any living creature. But in the hive-bee the 
whole arrangement seems to amount to what must 
be called an ideal inconvenience, seeing that her 
honey-sac and complicated organs for producing 
the larval food are in her abdomen, with no way 
to them but through this fine joint. Clearly there 
is some weighty reason for it, out-balancing all other 
considerations, or it would not exist ; and when we 
come to study it in connection with the honey-bee's 

£ 



no THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

peculiar system of flight, we soon arrive at the true 
solution. 

It has been said that the wings of the bee have 
a perfectly symmetrical action, and that they have 
a single fixed direction, moving up and down, always 
at right-angles with the line of the thorax. Under 
the microscope each of the four wings is seen as 
a transparent, impervious membrane, intersected 
with fine ribs. The front wing, however, has a much 
stronger and stiffer rib running the entire length 
of its upper edge, and it is on this main rib that 
almost the entire force of the flight-muscles is con- 
centrated. If you look farther, you will see that 
the under wing has a row of fine hooks along its top 
edge, while the lower edge of the upper wing is 
flanged or folded back. In flight the hooks on one 
wing engage with the flange on the other, and thus 
the wings on each side are automatically locked 
together, forming one continuous air-resisting sur- 
face. This combined wing is very flexible through- 
out, except at its upper edge, where it is stiffened 
by the main rib. In action, therefore, — the force 
being applied practically to the edge alone, which 
resists the air while the rest of the wing bends to it — 
the result is that the whole wing becomes an oscil- 
lating, inclined plane, whose inclination, forward 
on the down- stroke, is still forward on the up-stroke, 
because the plane-inclination reverses itself auto- 
matically. 

From this it will be understood how the flexible 
wings of the bee are used in straightforward flight ; 
but, seeing that the wings themselves are incapable 
of independent or irregular action, it is not yet clear 
how the bee contrives to steer herself, rising or 
descending, or turning sideways, just as the mood 
seizes her. It is here that the reason for the peculiar 
construction of her body becomes plain. The fine 
link which unites her abdomen to her thorax is 
really an universal joint, actuated by a series of 
powerful cross-muscles, and the bee steers herself 



A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY in 

through the air by using the weight of the lower 
half of her body as a counterpoise. By swinging 
her heavy abdomen forward or backward, or from 
side to side, she changes her centre of gravity, and 
the line of force of her aeroplanes, at one and the 
same time. Actually her body keeps its vertical 
position, being her heaviest part, and it is the lighter 
wing-supporting thorax which is deflected. But 
the result is the same, and every variety and direc- 
tion of flight is accomplished by the bee on what 
seems a far more simple plan than that evidenced 
in the flight of birds. 

One of the most difficult things to account for in 
the life of the honey-bee is the fact that the tem- 
perature of the hive can be varied at the will of its 
occupants. The system of mechanical ventilation 
will, of course, explain how the hive is kept cool in 
the greatest heats of summer, but it does not explain 
the sudden accessions of heat to which it is liable from 
time to time. These occur principally when the wax 
is being generated. Under the bronze armour-plates 
of her body the worker-bee has six shallow, but broad, 
depressions, beneath which the wax-glands are placed. 
Perfect rest and a high temperature seem to be neces- 
sary for the stimulation of these glands, and the 
wax-makers consume a large quantity of sweet-food 
during the process. It is generally stated that bees 
fill themselves from the stores of mature honey before 
uniting in the cluster ; but it is more probable that 
the food consumed during wax-making is principally 
the nectar, almost as gathered from the flowers. This 
view is confirmed by certain experiments which were 
undertaken to decide the amount of food assimilated 
during the production of a given weight of wax. 
When the bees had access only to honey, it was 
found that five or six pounds were needed during the 
time that one pound of wax was produced. But if 
the bees were fed on a plain syrup of cane-sugar, more 
wax was generated. The chemical composition of 
fresh nectar is almost identical with that of sugar 



U2 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

from the sugar-cane, but mature honey contains 
practically no cane-sugar at all. It is very doubtful, 
therefore, if the economic bee would deplete her hard- 
won stores of honey for a purpose that could be better 
accomplished in another and cheaper way. And it 
should also be borne in mind that the natural time 
for comb-building coincides with the season when 
nectar is in greatest plenty. 

These sudden variations in temperature appear to 
be brought about by a wholesale increase in the rate 
of respiration among the bees ; and there is nothing 
that excites the wonder of the student of hive-life 
more than the breathing-apparatus of the bee, as 
seen under the microscope. Practically her whole 
physical system is directly supplied with air, drawn 
in through her many spiracles. As far as scientists 
have been able to determine, there is not a fibre or 
nerve in her entire body that is not reached by the 
minute ramifications of the air-ducts, in direct com- 
munication with the great main breathing-vessels 
in the bee's abdomen. Respiration appears to be 
largely voluntary with the honey-bee. She breathes 
only when the necessity for it arises, and will some- 
times arrest the action entirely for three or four 
minutes together. But when the wax-making is 
going forward, or swarming-time is near at hand, the 
quick, vibratory movement of respiration is visible 
everywhere in the throng of bees, and the tempera- 
ture of the hive climbs up often to a dozen degrees 
above its normal point. 

The breathing system of the honey-bee is closely 
connected with her sound-organs. Anyone asked 
to describe the note made by a bee would probably 
say that she hums or buzzes, and there would be an 
end to most ideas on the matter. But to the beeman 
this is a pitifully inadequate statement of the truth. 
The bee comprises in herself not one, but a whole 
choir of voices, and she has a compass of at least an 
octave and a half. Every one of her fourteen spiracles, 
and each of her wings, is capable of producing sound ; 



A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY 113 

and these sounds can be endlessly varied in quality, 
intensity, and pitch. It is no exaggeration to say 
that the honey-bee is as accomplished a musician 
as any bird ; but as each individual voice is for the 
most part lost in the general symphony of the hive, 
it is difficult to get a complete idea of her capabilities 
as a soloist. 

The voice-apparatus in the spiracles is one of the 
most intricate things in the whole anatomy of the bee. 
It has a multiplicity of parts, and is obviously de- 
signed to convey a great variety of sounds. The 
wings also produce tones that run up or down in the 
scale, according to their rate of oscillation ; and 
from them comes the sibilant note usually called 
buzzing. Listening to the hive-music at any season 
of the year, it is impossible to resist the thought that 
bees not only hold individual communication by 
means of these infinitely varied sounds, but that the 
general note given out by the multitude unerringly 
expresses the state of affairs within the hive for the 
time being. A prosperous stock voices its busy con- 
tentment in a way impossible to misunderstand. It 
is a deep, blithe, resonant sound, like the steady run- 
ning of well-oiled machinery, each wheel adding its 
own whirring melody to the general theme. Weak 
or famishing colonies give out a wavering, intermit- 
tent note, the very voice of complaint and fear for the 
future. When a hive has lost its queen, a capable 
bee-master should have no difficulty in divining the 
trouble by listening at the hive-entrance. A queen- 
less stock is all clamour and the hubbub of divided 
counsels. The ordinary rich reverberation of labour 
stops, and a sound of panic goes to and fro in the hive 
unceasingly. If a hive be quietly opened, and its 
queen removed with little disturbance, it may be some 
time before the bees discover their loss. Some 
colonies experimented with in this way realise their 
deprivation immediately, and the hue-and-cry begins 
at once. But one of the most curious facts in bee- 
life is the variation in intelligence, and alertness of 



H4 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

perception, between the different hives. A steady- 
going, dull race may be a considerable time before it 
perceives the absence of its queen. The common note 
of work goes on unchanged until the fact dawns on it. 
And then the peculiar shrill outcry commences, over- 
powering all other sounds until reason again asserts 
itself in the colony, and the bees set about the work 
of raising another queen. 

The voice of the drone is deeper and hoarser than 
that of the worker-bee, by reason of his larger body ; 
and his noisier buzzing is explained by his greater 
length and breadth of wing. The queeri also has 
a deeper, more husky voice during flight ; but she 
has, in addition, a peculiar cry of her own, an old 
familiar sound to bee-keepers all the world over. 
It is heard principally just before the swarming of 
the hive. Certain old skeppists profess to be able to 
foretell the date on which a swarm will issue by 
studying the cry of the queen. On quiet nights, just 
before the swarming-season commences, it may fre- 
quently be heard above the general murmur of the 
hive by bending the ear down to the entrance. It 
is a shrill piping sound, repeated over and over again, 
and often answered by other and fainter notes. How 
it is produced is not certainly known, but probably 
it is caused by the wings or legs being sharply rubbed 
together, much as a cricket or grasshopper utters its 
cry. The louder note is made by the old queen, and 
there is no doubt of its import. Jealousy and the 
lust of battle are on her, and she is trying to get at 
the young princesses in their cells. The cry is one 
of baffled fury as she strives with the guards about 
the cells, and the answering notes come from the 
imprisoned queens who are just as eager for the fray. 
The old skeppists are never far out in their reckoning. 
When this state of affairs has begun, the crisis is 
imminent ; and the morrow is sure to see the emi- 
grating party setting off for its new home, carrying 
the old queen irresistibly with it. 

Jt has been said that the nurse-bees, who have the 



A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY 115 

entire charge and care of the young brood, feed the 
larvae from their mouths with a thick white fluid, 
which is aptly called bee-milk. All the time the 
nurses are engaged on this work, they are themselves 
hearty eaters of both honey and pollen ; so that at 
first sight it appears as if the bee had the power of in- 
stantaneous digestion, feeding herself at one moment, 
and, at the next, regurgitating this food, changed into 
a totally different substance, to feed the young grubs. 
Moreover, there is another wonderful thing regarding 
this bee-milk. It has been proved by careful analysis 
that its composition varies considerably. The male, 
female, and queen-larvae are all fed with it, but its 
constitution differs, not only with each kind of larva, 
but according to the age the larva has reached. The 
bee must therefore have her whole system of diges- 
tion under full voluntary control. How she manages 
this critical part of her work can only be understood 
by the aid of a good microscope. 

Perhaps there is nothing more wonderful, in the 
whole wonderful anatomy of the bee, than her diges- 
tive organism and its contributory system of glands, 
each of which has its special and important use. 
When she draws up the nectar from the flowers, it 
passes at once into the first of her two stomachs, 
which is simply and solely a reservoir. Here it can 
remain indefinitely at the will of the bee ; or it can 
be thrown up and poured into the comb-cells, to be 
brewed into honey ; or it can be allowed to pass 
through a valve at the base of the reservoir into the 
bee's second and lower stomach, where digestion 
takes place and the honey and pollen are formed 
into chyle. But, by one of the most ingenious de- 
vices in nature, this second stomach is also capable 
of returning its contents to the mouth, and the chyle 
is there changed into bee-milk for the nourishment 
of the larvae. 

The worker-bee has, in all, four distinct glands, each 
secreting a fluid with properties different from the 
other three. These glands are all situated in the 



n6 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

mouth. Two of them have a common opening in 
the upper side of the root of the tongue ; and as the 
bee sucks, their combined secretions mingle with the 
flower- juices automatically, and the first step in the 
change of the nectar into honey takes place. The 
third gland is in the roof of the mouth, and it is 
the secretion from this gland which acts on the re- 
gurgitated chyle, and changes it into brood-food. 
The fourth gland is double. These twin-glands have 
their openings at the base of the jaws, and the action 
of chewing is necessary to excite their secretion. 

The valve between the upper, or honey-stomach; 
and the lower, or chyle-stomach, has an extensible 
neck, and the bee can, at will, raise this telescopic 
piece through the interior of the honey-sac until the 
valve is pressed against the opening into the gullet. 
Thus the contents of the lower stomach can be driven 
into the mouth without coming into contact with 
the stored sweets in the reservoir, and this pre- 
digested matter is always ready at an instant's notice 
for the use of the larvae, or for the nourishment of 
drones or queen. 

It has been said that the nursery-work of the hive 
is undertaken exclusively by the young bees during 
the first fortnight or so of their lives. After this 
time they make their first foraging expedition, be- 
ginning with pollen-gathering, and relinquishing this 
in turn for the collection of nectar when they have 
arrived at full maturity. The mature workers take 
no part in the feeding of the larvae, except on very 
rare emergencies. In relation to this, it is a curious 
fact that the gland in the roof of the mouth, which 
acts on the chyle, forming it into brood-food, is in 
full development only during the first weeks of the 
worker-bee's career. After that its activity swiftly 
declines, until, in old workers, it becomes largely 
atrophied. 

The digestive gland-system of the honey-bee, 
although it has been fairly well explored by the 
scientific naturalists, is still much of a mystery, and 



A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY 117 

this especially with regard to the glands attached to 
the jaws. The secretion from these glands — obviously 
a very powerful acid — is mainly used to convert the 
raw wax from its hard, brittle character into the 
soft, ductile material of which the combs are made, 
It is probably used to some extent, also, in the prepara- 
tion of the brood-food, in conjunction with the gland 
in the roof of the mouth. It mingles with the pollen 
when this is masticated, and no doubt it has various 
other uses ; but no one seems as yet to have discovered 
why these two glands should be so enormously de- 
veloped in the queen, who takes no part in the 
nursery-work or comb-building. The whole ques- 
tion will naturally have little more than a passing 
interest for the general reader ; but, to the bee- 
keeper with a microscope, it takes a prominent place 
among the debatable things in hive-life. If the 
difference between the queen-bee and the worker-bee 
— a difference of organic structure as well as mere 
development — is really brought about by variation 
in the quality and quantity of the food supplied to 
the larvae, then the action of these glands cannot be 
over-estimated in importance, and cannot be studied 
too deeply : they form the very spring and fount of 
life. Yet is it certain that the influence brought to 
bear on the young grubs by the nurse-bees is wholly 
restricted to the matter of food ? The worker-bee 
has several curious organs and gland-systems in 
various parts of her body, in addition to those alread3' 
enumerated, to which no rational use has yet been 
assigned. The more we study her extraordinary 
equipment, the less justification there appears to be 
for dogmatising about her, limiting or particularising 
the function of any one gland or implement in the 
whole unending array. The old adage, that there is 
nothing invariable about the honey-bee, is like to be 
as true with regard to her physiology as it is with her 
habits of life ; and, for all we can tell, to-morrow's 
knowledge may render obsolete much of the carefully 
garnered knowledge of to-day. 



n8 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

If the story of the honey-bee's anatomy has every- 
where some of the elements of romance about it — 
in its unexpected incidents, its adventurous colour, 
its shadow of a great design — this spirit suffers no 
abatement when we come, in a last view of it, to 
consider her as one carrying arms, one bearing such 
a weapon of offence as never came into human mind 
to fashion. The long curved scimitar of the queen, 
which she cherishes so carefully that nothing will 
induce her to strike with it except when it is to be 
turned against a royal foe, is otherwise little else 
than a harmless piece of domestic furniture. But 
the sting of the valorous worker-bee, seen under a 
microscope, is a positively terrifying engine of de- 
struction. Popular science generally describes it as 
a sheath containing a barbed and poisonous dart ; 
and the trite comparison is always made of the bee's 
sting with the finest sewing-needle, the latter being 
likened to a rough bar of iron. The idea of a sheath 
is pure fiction, as a little painstaking examination 
will soon reveal. 

The bee's sting is made up of three separate lances, 
each with a barbed edge, and each capable of being 
thrust forward independently of the others. The 
central and broader lance has a hollow face, furnished 
at each side with a rail, or beading, which runs its 
whole length. On the back of each of the other two 
lances there is a longitudinal groove, and into these 
grooves lit the raised headings of the central lancet. 
Thus the sting is like a sword with .three blades — 
united, but sliding upon one another- — the barbed 
points of which continue to advance alternately into 
the wound, going ever deeper and deeper of their own 
malice aforethought after the initial thrust is made. 
It is a device of war, compared to which the explosive 
bullet is but a clumsy brutality. Yet this is not all. 
To make its death-dealing powers doubly sure, this 
thorough-minded amazon must fill the haft of her 
triple blade with a subtle poison, and so contrive its 
sliding mechanism that the same impulse, w T hich 



A ROMANCE OF ANATOMY 119 

drives the points successively forward, drenches the 
whole weapon with a fatal juice. 

The tendency to be unduly scientific, to meet these 
things with exact and unimaginative interest, receives 
its final quietus here. For he who realises the whole 
deadly efficacy of the honey-bee's sting cannot logi- 
cally pass it by as a mere remarkable provision of 
nature, praising God for it complacently, but must 
concede it a much wider significance. This com- 
plicated weapon of the stunted, sex-thwarted worker- 
bee owes its existence as much to deliberate art as 
to nature, or those who watch the Omnipotent in 
hive-life are strangely and perversely led astray. In 
the queen-mother, whose physical organism may be 
said to be comparatively unchanged from its ab- 
original type, we see the part corresponding to the 
worker's sting, essentially another creation. The 
queen's ovipositor is longer ; it is curved ; the barbs 
upon it are small and insignificant ; the fluid in the 
secreting-gland is no poison at all, but a thick opaque 
substance, whose true use is probably to glue the 
eggs safely to the bottoms of the cells. She is also 
provided with a pair of blunt instruments covered 
with sensitive hairs, which serve, with the ovipositor, 
to guide the egg securely to its destination. The 
worker-bee has these feelers on either side of her 
sting, but she has perverted them to a very different 
office, that of seeking out the vulnerable parts of her 
enemy. And what a drastic change her will, or that 
of her foster-mothers, has wrought in the whole con- 
trivance ! She has bartered the privilege of mother- 
hood and years of life for a few short months and a 
share in the communal sovereignty. She must be 
ready to further the well-being of the hive by the 
art of war as well as by the arts of peace. Therefore 
she has deliberately helped in fashioning the plough- 
shares into cannon. A little change in her food as 
a nursling, an infinitesimal leaking from a gland that 
takes the full power of the strongest glass to see, 
and, with all the other multitudinous changes of 



iao THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

form and character, this last miracle comes quietly 
into being. The egg-depositing shaft grows short 
and straight ; its moderate indentations become 
cruel jagged barbs designed to hold as well as to kill ; 
the harmless, egg-fastening gluten is quickened into 
a virulent poison ; and the death-dealing thing is 
ready and ripe for service against all honey-lovers* 
the hereditary foes of the hive. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM 

THE old " swarm in May," beloved of ancient 
beemen, is rapidly becoming a thing of the 
past. Modern hives and modern methods, although 
they have not as yet achieved their main intent 
of abolishing natural swarming altogether, yet 
tend to bring this extraordinary ebullition of hive- 
life to its fulfilment later and later in each year. 
Far from being a virtue, as of old, an early swarm, 
or indeed any swarm at all, is now accounted a 
misfortune, even a downright disgrace, in scientific 
beemanship. And yet the bees, though easy to 
discourage, are hard to teach. In spite of roomy 
hives and a watchful bee-master ready to give them 
an unbroken succession of young and fertile queens, 
and a whole houseful of new furniture at a moment's 
notice, still the bees go on playing this mad game of 
wholesale truantry, and still the bee-keeper must 
stand looking hopelessly on from the midst of his 
elaborate appliances, while his property sings about 
his ears, or wings away into the upper skies, irre- 
vocable as last year's mill-water. 

Beemen call it the swarming fever ; and fever it 
is in very truth. The reasons for it have long ago 



THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM 121 

been crystallised into exact and accepted phrases. 
An overcrowded condition of the hive ; the desire 
of the bees to get rid of a failing queen ; the excite- 
ment of the queen herself at the menace of coming 
rivals ; the natural instinct of colonies to increase 
and multiply — anything but the one all-sufficient 
and obvious reason, that bees swarm because they 
suddenly and intensely desire it. 

The story of the Sioux Indian— won for civilisa- 
tion from boyhood, over-educated and over-refined, 
decorated with a high college- degree and adorning a 
great pulpit, and then casting it all to the four winds, 
stripping and painting himself, and raging away with 
his kind on the war-trail — has a near parallel in the 
behaviour of bees at swarming-time. Instinct could 
never be a party to such an inconsequent, outrageous, 
brilliantly reckless, joyous proceeding. But it is 
ever in the way of reason to be splendidly unreason- 
able at times, and here the honey-bee shows herself 
the true child of her origins. From a stern, self- 
elected destiny-maker, callously pressing to the fore- 
front of life over all obstacles of heart and hearth, 
she changes back, for the nonce, into the aboriginal 
bee-woman, thoughtless, pleasure-loving, improvi- 
dent, spending the garnered treasure of laborious 
days in the one mad moment's frolic. 

For it is impossible to regard the incident of the 
swarm as only one more link in the chain of sober, 
calculating bee-wisdom. It is obviously a lapse, a 
general falling away from the all- wise, public polity. 
For a single hour in her drudging, joyless, perfect 
life, the worker-bee battens down all the virtues, and 
rages forth like the Sioux Indian to swill at the 
stream of forbidden love and laughter, unmindful 
of the cost. Just when the common self-abnegation 
is yielding its rich first-fruits of prosperity, and the 
hive is overflowing with its wealth of citizens and 
possessions, this fever comes among them, and spreads 
like a prairie fire. By all laws of prudence it is now, 
of all times, that every child of the Mother-State 



122 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

should stand by her mightily, to uphold her in the 
high place won for her by unending toil and in- 
numerable lives. But old ancestral memory wakens, 
calling irresistibly. Nature, in the beginning of 
time, made the honey-bee to inhabit a tropic land, 
where there was no need for pent, cold-withstanding 
houses, nor any use in laying up provender for days 
of dearth, because the land flowed with perpetual 
honey. Bee-life in those far-off ages was all dancing 
in the sunshine, and the bee-woman had little to do 
but to fly to the nearest brimming flower-cup when 
her nurslings wanted food. But a cooling world, the 
ever northward trend of her race, and then the folly of 
her own wisdom— intellect turning upon itself — all 
combined to lose for her the old slothful paradise of 
plenty. The drone, reasoning inversely by the 
wisdom of his folly, made a better compromise with 
fate. He held to his life of ease and his gratuitous 
pleasures at all cost, and let his mate go her way 
undeterred, blinding his eyes to the new necessities. 
Work and responsibility gradually soured and sharp- 
ened and hardened the one, while dependence on 
his womankind as insidiously changed the other 
into a creature of idleness and the senses. And when 
he came at last to realise the outcome of it all, it 
was too late. The matriarchal commonwealth was 
established, hedged round securely with a myriad 
poisoned blades. To live a drone had been his heart's 
desire, and now dronehood, mere seminality, was 
allotted to him, as a retribution. The things for 
which man lifts his unregarded prayer all his life 
through, might very well prove his fittest punish- 
ment, granted to him in the Hereafter : so little 
can man or drone distinguish between the enduring 
things of life and death. 

But of all intolerable fates, that must be least 
bearable, to have wisely willed and beautifully 
fashioned our own eternity ; and then, being only 
human, or at least reasonable, to find its goodness 
really smooth-going, colour-fast, impregnable at all 



THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM 123 

points, with never a bright break or flaw to vary the 
monotony of well-doing. No wonder the honey-bee 
swarms, breaks helter-skelter out of her prison- 
bounds of order, commendable toil, chill, maidenly 
propriety ; and goes rioting away for one short 
hour of joyousness and madcap frolic, such as her 
primaeval sisters looked to as the common day's lot, 
when there were no hives, and motherhood was not 
the sole prerogative of one in thirty thousand, and 
when the sun burned high and cheerily in heaven 
from end to end of the tropic year. It is easy to 
be wise, and temperately scientific, in accounting 
for this feverish impulse of the worker-bees, allotting 
it a sound and circumspect part in the furtherance 
of the general polity. But is it not, in the main, 
Nature — the atrophied sexual spirit — awakening, or 
at least stirring a little in her age-long sleep ? In 
the sultry August evenings the young queens of the 
ant-hills pour out in unnumbered thousands to meet 
the males, and people the ruddy sunshine with the 
glint of their wings. This is swarming in its truest 
sense. The wingless, workful, underground existence 
follows, but the love-flight of the ants, while it lasts, 
is none the less a real, intensely joyous thing. And 
surely the swarming-fever that so strangely and 
inopportunely seizes upon hive-life, is at one with it 
in nature and spirit, although its original purpose 
and value have been long ago lost in the ages. 

The one in the whole multitude who alone has 
the full inheritance of her sex, the queen-bee, seems 
often at the fountain-head of the revolution. Some- 
times, undoubtedly, it is she who first develops this 
longing, feverish unrest, and by little and little 
communicates it to the whole colony. Here the 
variability of bee-nature comes sharply into evidence. 
Some hives will show this restless spirit for many 
days before the swarm issues, while with others the 
great upheaval seems, as far as the mass of bees is 
concerned, to be a sudden unpremeditated thing 
occurring in the midst of the universal content and 



124 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

industry. The preparations for raising new queens 
are always taken in hand betimes, but probably this 
is the work of the far-seeing, sober old bees of the 
hive, with whom communism has become a settled 
and accepted calamity. The bees who will ultimately 
constitute the swarm may be supposed to nourish 
their secret desire from the first moment the queen 
shows signs of mutability ; to neglect all their old 
tasks, first in heart and then in reality ; and finally 
— -when the queen's mood has reached its culmina- 
ting point, and her work in the hive is in virtual 
abeyance — -to throw down plummet and trowel and 
hod, and rush forth in a wild, hilarious company, 
urged by a longing that they are as powerless to 
resist as to understand. 

In the study of bee-life one comes upon many 
questions, but seldom answers to fit all. If the 
queen's fecundation takes place only once in her life, 
and nature intends this to suffice for her whole fruit- 
ful period, it is not easy to see why she should go out 
with the swarm at all. That she is not the inveterate 
recluse as generally believed, and that she does oc- 
casionally make short flights in the open during her 
laying career, is well proved. The desire, therefore, 
to see the light again after a long incarceration can- 
not be urged as her reason for going off with the 
swarm. A much more plausible notion is that the 
sexual spirit is again roused in the queen, just as it 
seems to be roused for the first time in the worker-bee ; 
and that, with all, the journey is undertaken as a 
mating-flight, a faint re-echo of a racial custom long 
extinct, bearing the closest analogy to the marriage- 
swarm from the ant-hill. It must be borne in mind 
that, although the queen-bee is undoubtedly rendered 
capable of producing her kind of both sexes during 
several years, as the result of a single fertilisation, it 
cannot be incontestably held that she never again 
meets the drone under any circumstances. There is 
nothing in her physical organism to prevent a second 
coition, although with the drone this is impossible, 



THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM 125 

forbore reasons than the all-sufficient one— that he 
dies ti his marriage-hour. 

In he old bee-gardens, where the " swarm in May ( 
is still a living, present thing, it is pleasant to sit 
with tin proprietor under the rosy shade of apple- 
boughs waiting for the swarms to issue, and " talking 
bees/' wlich is the most nerve-soothing, soul-refresh- 
ing occupation in the world. There never was a bee- 
keeper, nev style, or old style, too busy to talk, 
provided that you met him with understanding, and 
were as impatient as he of digressions from the all- 
important theme. One soon gets tired of imparting 
information as to the wonders of hive-life to the 
ignorant and plainly apprehensive stranger, and none 
sooner than he of the old school. In the quietest 
apiary of pure-bred English bees there are always a 
few individuals of crotchety nature, who will search 
you out in the shady orchard seat, and, as like as not, 
knife you on the least provocation. If you are a 
beeman, you treat these vindictive approaches with 
unconcern. You go on listening to the old man's 
talk, while the bee shrills away at your eyelids, or 
creeps into your ear and out again. If you keep quiet, 
she will soon relinquish the dull sport, and wing 
harmlessly away ; and the thread of the master's 
discourse is not interrupted. But the uninformed 
stranger is a nuisance at these solitudes for two. He 
flinches and shudders ; makes little irritating retreats ; 
beats about wildly with his hands ; or, if he is made 
of the sternest mettle, he sits rigidly upright when he 
should be reclining at his ease, and turns such a pain- 
fully polite, though distracted, ear to his informant, 
that the stream of talk is sure to dry up incontinently, 
and he feels as little welcome as ghostly Banquo at 
the feast. 

When you have once lived among hives it is a sore 
thing to be without their music. On warm days, 
winter and summer alike, there is always this drowsy, 
dreamy song in the air ; and dancing without the 
fiddlers is no more depressing an occupation than, 



126 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

to a beeman, is loitering in a garden of mere 4ent 
vegetables and flowers. Sitting now under the lower 
of apple-blossoms and watching for the swards, the 
full sweet note from the hives comes over to you 
like the very voice of serene content. It pervades 
the sunshine. It gently qualifies the slow wnd in the 
tree-tops. It lifts and falls like the lilt o a far-off 
summer sea. This is the labour-song : tfie song of 
the swarm is very different. To the trailed ear the 
caesura that presently comes in the midst ji the music 
is as clear as a pistol shot, though you may detect no 
change. The old bee-keeper stops short in his 
wandering tale about famous honey-years of half 
a lifetime back, seizes key and pan, and hurries 
across the garden. It is the old green hive again, 
he tells 3'ou, as you press hard upon his heels — it 
is always the old green hive that has swarmed the 
earliest every May for years back. And forthwith 
the key and pan begin their clattering ding-dong 
melody. 

Old-fashioned bee-keeping is not always a matter 
of straw. Box-hives, without, of course, the modern 
inside furniture, have been in use nearly as long as 
the straw skep ; and the hives in the garden are of 
this ancient pattern. The old green hive is keeping 
well up to its reputation. Already it is the centre of 
a swirling crowd of bees, and, as you look, a dense 
black stream of them is pouring out of the entrance 
so fast and furiously that it is almost impossible to 
distinguish what they are. And the old wild trek- 
song is growing louder and deeper with every moment, 
a rich vibrant tenor note unlike any other sound in 
nature. There is no doubt at all of its import, as you 
stand in the wing-darkened sunshine, caught up in 
the excitement of it all, and feeling much as if you 
were facing a tearing sou'-west gale. Every bee of 
the twenty or thirty thousand volleying madly to and 
fro overhead, is singing her bravest and loudest. 
There is only one meaning to the whole gargantuan 
chorus. It is sheer jubilation melodised : a wild, 



THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM 127 

glad long of freedom, as though not a bee amongst 
them md ever before set eyes on the sunshine and 
the wealth of an English May. 

The gieat door-key, a ponderous, antiquated piece 
of metal, beats out its clanging note, and the swarm 
lifts higher and higher into the blue. Gradually the 
sombre mist of bees draws closer together, looking 
now like a Ettle dark cloud strayed from a forgotten 
summer storm. Now it sails slowly northward, and 
lightens, as the sunlight is caught by the beating 
wings as in a net of silver ; and now it veers away into 
the very eye of the sun, and changes into black, 
revolving tracery again ; whirring wheels within 
wheels of insect-life, spinning-wheels making thread to 
weave the garments of a whole nation, and humming 
as never spinning-wheels hummed before. 

But the beginning of the end is nigh ; the time of 
singing is nearly over. The old beeman stops his 
weird tom-tomming, throws down key and pan, and 
points to the topmost branch of a young apple- 
sapling. You see a little black knot of bees clinging 
to it no larger than a pigeon's egg. A moment later, 
and it has grown to the size of a double fist, and 
another moment sees it twice this size again, as the 
flying bees stream towards it from all directions. 
Now it is as big as a quart measure, and the branch 
is slowly bending down under its weight. In an 
incredibly short space of time the whole swarm has 
joined the cluster ; they hang together in a long, 
brown, glistening, cigar-shaped mass, well-nigh touch- 
ing the ground, and the wild, merry music is over for 
good. 

Gently swaying in the sunlight, lifeless and inert 
but for a few restless bees that hum about it, the 
sight of a settled swarm has an almost uncanny effect 
on most observers. A little before, the whole garden 
was filled with its deafening, joyous hubbub ; now 
a strange silence has fallen, and it is impossible to 
dissociate from its present state the idea of an bject 
depression and disillusionment, as though the whole 



128 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

thing had been but a mad escapade, of whicn the 
bees were now heartily ashamed. If we mry con- 
ceive the issue of a swarm to be a freak of aicestral 
memory, the sudden irresistible impulse to /ollow an 
old racial habit, long obsolete, it is not dmcult to 
account for the obvious change of mind that has now 
come over the absconding host. Packed within the 
hive in a feverish, surging multitude, disabilities were 
not self-evident as they are now, tried in the light of 
day. 

" Violent delights have violent ends, 
And, in their triumph, die." 

And now there is the morrow to be thought of : 
life to be rendered possible in all odds of weather ; 
a home to be made ; the queen-mother to be 
sheltered — she, the one remaining possession of the 
crowd, beggared now, but so rich a moment before. 
There is hard work ahead, enough to sober the 
giddiest among them. The madness has gone as 
quickly as it came, and now the honey-bee is to show 
herself a reasoning creature, if never before. 

It is believed by most bee-keepers that a swarm 
selects the site of its future dwelling some time before 
the expedition starts, in many cases several days 
earlier. An old trick among cottagers is to place out 
empty hives in their gardens, and these not un- 
commonly attract errant swarms. A few bees are 
seen cruising about, and subjecting the hives to a 
close scrutiny. These pioneer bees disappear, and 
after a variable time, from a few minutes to a few 
hours, or even days, a whole army of bees suddenly 
descends from the sky and takes possession of the 
new home. When the interval between the appear- 
ance of the scouts and the arrival of the main body 
is only a short one, the reconnoitring bees have been 
manifestly sent out by the clustered swarm ; but in 
the case of long periods elapsing, the scouts must 
have been sent in search of the new location before 
the swarm issued. Probably, although the bulk of 



THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM 129 

the party is imbued with this reckless spirit alone, 
thinking and caring for nothing else but the escape 
and the frolic, many of the older and wiser bees 
undertake the matter in a temperate, businesslike 
way, as they would go about any other important 
hive-operation. In one sense, therefore, the old 
notion of there being "subordinate lieutenants, 
captains, and governours" in a hive may not be so 
very far from the truth. That these scouts are 
actually sent out to find a suitable site for the new 
colony, either before the swarm leaves or while it 
is clustered in the open, is a well-established fact, so 
that some of the bees at least must keep their wits 
about them throughout the general chaos. 

And with these wiser virgins must be reckoned the 
queen, in spite of the fact that she joins in the public 
excitement and restlessness. For some days before 
the great emigration her work of egg-laying is largely 
arrested, and this retentive action renders her so 
heavy and bulky that often she can scarcely get on 
the wing. The object of this is that she may be all 
the more ready for laying when the new home is estab- 
lished. It is also well ascertained that all swarming 
bees have their honey-sacs well filled, and this loading 
up for the journey takes place just before the signal 
for departure is given. There is great variation in 
the behaviour of the different stocks in a bee-garden 
during the swarming season, and many close observers 
are unable to detect any sure signs that a particular 
hive is going to swarm. But it appears fairly well 
established that, when a swarm is imminent, nearly 
all the bees of that stock remain at home, even when 
all other hives in the garden are in full foraging 
activity. Such a hive gives out a peculiar throbbing 
note, which suggests the noise made by a powerful 
locomotive brought to a standstill, but with full steam 
up, and impatient to be gone. Just before the issue 
of the swarm there is often a curious lull in this pent- 
up, forceful sound, and probably this is the moment 
when the travellers are lading themselves up for the 



ijo THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

march. Immediately after — and here it is difficult 
not to believe that a definite, authoritative signal for 
the movement is given — a sudden stir and tumult 
begins in the centre of the crowded hive, much like 
that caused by a heav}' stone cast into wacer. This 
radiates swiftly in all directions until it reaches the 
bees near the entrance, and then the general rush for 
the daylight starts. Where a hive is much over- 
crowded there will already be a cluster of bees num- 
bering many thousands packed tightly together on 
the alighting-board, and sometimes covering the whole 
face of the hive. But this mass melts away directly 
the swarming begins, the waiting bees taking wing all 
but simultaneously with the others. 

It was anciently believed that the queen led the 
swarm, but this view is not borne out by modern 
observation. As often as not half the bees are on 
the wing before she makes her appearance, and some- 
times she is among the very latest to leave, or she may 
decide at the last moment not to go at all. In this 
case the bees do not cluster, but after a few minutes 
wild tarantelle in the sunshine they all troop back to 
the hive. 

When once the swarming party has gone off, the 
old hive seems to settle down to its ordinary occupa- 
tions as though nothing out of the way had happened. 
The congested state of affairs no longer exists, but 
otherwise the work of the hive is proceeding in the usual 
way. The bees left behind are mainly young workers 
who have not yet commenced foraging, but there 
is always a fair sprinkling of old workers and drones. 
Generally the hive is queenless for the time being, 
the new queen not having yet broken from her cell. 
There may be four or five queen-cells in various stages 
of development, or rarely as many as a dozen. Some- 
times, however, the first of the queens will be already 
hatched and wandering over the combs, meeting, as 
usual at this stage of her career, perfect indifference 
from all she encounters. But hives have been known 
to send off a swarm when the preparations for raising 



THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM 131 

a new queen have been scarcely begun. So variable 
is the honey-bee in all her ways. 

If the objects of swarming were merely to relieve 
the congestion in the hive, and to change the mother- 
bee, the whole thing should now be at an end. But 
the swarming impulse is rooted in far deeper soil than 
mere expediency. With some strains of bees the fever 
seems to die out after the one attack, and the stock 
settles down quietly to work for the rest of the season. 
But more often than not this first taste of adventure 
serves only to whet the national appetite for more. 
About nine days after the first swarm leaves, another 
swarm often follows, and this may be succeeded by 
a third or even a fourth at a few days' interval, result- 
ing in some cases in the almost complete extinction of 
the stock. The old skeppists called the second swarm 
a " cast/' the third was a " colt," and the fourth a 
" filly." It is difficult to understand how, in a com- 
munity where individual interest is so ruthlessly 
sacrificed to the general good, this self-destructive 
policy should be permitted. But taking the view that 
swarming is in the main a vague and incomplete 
resurrection of a long obsolete habit in bee-life, 
a workable theory at once suggests itself. Under 
primaeval conditions the continued life of the mother- 
colony may have been unnecessary. Its purpose 
may have been fully served when a number of young 
queens and drones had been raised, and the whole 
had swarmed out together, each to form a new settle- 
ment. It must be remembered that the bee-hive, 
persisting indefinitely from year to year, is really 
quite a modern creation, and became practicable only 
with the invention of the movable comb-frame, which 
allowed the bee-master to effect the renewal of combs. 
It has been seen that the brood-combs get gradually 
choked up with the pupa-cocoons, which each bee 
leaves behind it. These webs are so incredibly thin 
that a dozen of them make little appreciable differ- 
ence to the capacity of the cell, and combs have been 
known to remain in use for brood-raising as long as 



132 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

twenty years. But eventually they must become 
useless ; and then, as bees do not, or cannot, remove 
old combs to make way for new, the community must 
leave for a new home, or gradually die out. Thus the 
age of the old hives was definitely limited. 

Modern beemanship has wrought many other 
changes in the life of the honey-bee in addition to 
creating the permanent hive-city. The number of 
bees in a single strong stock, housed in a modern 
frame hive, is probably three times as great as that 
of a wild colony. The work of the bee-master affects 
almost every aspect of bee-life, enlarging the scale 
and the scope of all that the bees attempt. The 
result of this is seen not only in an increased popu- 
lation and more extensive works, but in a change in 
the very systems of life. Plans that work very well 
on a small scale do not always succeed on a large. 
The sanitary problems of a city are necessarily very 
different from those of a village, in principle as well as 
in degree. And probably much of the ingenuity of 
system and device observable in modern hive-life is 
directly due to human agency, the new conditions 
introduced by the bee-master serving to educate the 
bees to greater effort and resource. 

The behaviour of these after-swarms offers a 
curious contrast to that of the first one. If it were 
possible to point to one fixed and invariable law in 
bee-life, it would be to the fact that a prime swarm 
will leave the hive only on a fine, warm day, and 
generally about noon. But casts and colts and fillies 
seem to take no count of time or weather, issuing 
just as the mood besets them, early or late, and caring 
nothing, apparently, for the conditions abroad. It is 
even on record that once a second swarm came off at 
midnight, when the moon was at the full and the 
weather very clear and warm. 

There seems altogether much more method in the 
madness that seizes on a colony swarming for the first 
time, and if thereafter the hive settles down to its 
old courses, the national character for sobrietv and 



THE MYSTERY OF THE SWARM 133 

industry soon rehabilitates itself. But it is just the 
strength of this public inclination towards order and 
labour which varies so greatly in different hives. 
How matters are likely to go can be readily ascer- 
tained by setting careful watch on the hive from the 
day the first swarm leaves. There are sure to be 
several queen-cells, some capped over and almost 
ready to hatch out, and others in various stages of 
development. All these cells are constantly and 
assiduously guarded by the worker-bees, because 
directly one of the queens is hatched, her first thought 
is to make a speedy end to all future rivalry by mur- 
dering her sisters. She comes from her cell evidently 
spoiling for a fight, and imbued to the core with that 
inveterate hatred of her kind which is the ruling 
passion of her existence. 

That worker-bees and queen-bees should have an 
identical origin, and yet that the nature of the one is 
to live in perfect harmony, while the nature of the 
other is to be at perpetual war, is one of those mys- 
terious things in bee-life which probably will never be 
explained. If the queen-bee of to-day can be really 
taken as an approximate type of the aboriginal 
female of her race, it is not difficult to understand that 
after her generation in force the communal life of the 
mother-stock would become an impossibility, and 
that with the mating-swarm its natural existence was 
brought to a close, much as we see it happen in wasp- 
life. 

It is during the quiet nights, after the issue of a 
swarm, that the peculiar shrill voice of the queen is 
most frequently heard. As she strives with the 
guards that surround the cells of the other young 
queens as yet unliberated, she continually utters this 
quick piping cry, and is immediately answered by 
the smothered cries of the imprisoned ones, who are 
just as anxious as she for the fray. If the swarming- 
fever is not yet allayed in the hive, this war-cry is 
bandied to and fro unceasingly ; and the general fer- 
ment deepens, until, the condition of things having 



i 3 4 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

seemingly grown intolerable, the young queen rushes 
out, followed by the greater number of the bees. 
In the case of after-swarms, the concensus of evidence 
is in favour of the belief that the queen is really the 
leader of the party, although here again no positive 
rule is observed. 

It may happen, however, that the stock is sick 
of all the turbulence and unrest that have so long 
beset it, and that the general desire is to restore the 
status quo. Under these conditions the sounds from 
the hive may have a very different quality and mean-* 
ing. The queen still sends forth her shrill challenge, 
but now her cry is immediately followed by a 
curious hissing sound from the bees. It is exactly 
as if they were shouting her down, compelling her to 
silence by their own uproar ; and when the war-cry 
of the first liberated queen is thus met by a chorus of 
disapprobation, it seldom happens that the stock 
swarms again. In a few days the queen goes forth 
alone on her honeymooning adventures ; and on 
her return she is allowed to indulge her penchant for 
sororicide to her heart's content. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE COMB-BUILDERS 

IN the foregoing chapters an attempt has been 
made to show that the hone3'-bee lives and 
moves and has her being in a world which must 
be actuated by something better than mere n.stinct, 
in the common usage of the term. To the modern 
biologist — the earnest out-of-door student of life 
under all its manifestations — this may appear as 
a rather obvious and unnecessary gilding of gold, 
and the only question yet undecided may seem to be 



THE COMB-BUILDERS 135 

where in the scale of reason the honey-bee is to find 
her equitable place. 

All bee-lovers must plead guilty to an inveterate 
partizanship, the writer frankly among their number. 
There is no laodiceanism in bee-craft ; and, all the 
world over, it may be said that, where a few bee- 
hives have been got together, there is always to be 
found a red-hot enthusiast not far off. The word 
" freemasonry," in the English tongue, has grown 
to be a synonym for the truest fraternity ; but just 
as real, and almost as far-reaching, is the brother- 
hood among keepers of bees. No doubt, among 
themselves the tendency is rather to magnify the 
virtues and achievements of their charges ; to be 
over-lavish of inference from too scanty or too isolated 
facts. And the proved impossibility of having any- 
thing to do with the honey-bee without being carried 
away sooner or later on a high wave of enthusiasm, 
makes any attempt at holding the balances truly 
between the zealous bee-lover and the interested but 
temperate-minded reader, a difficult and delicate 
task. Any writer on the honey-bee nowadays must 
be reckoned an ultra-specialist in an age of specialism ; 
and here it is not easy to preserve the sense of pro- 
portion undimmed, especially for one admittedly 
speaking out of the ranks of beemanship, where all 
are aiders and abettors in ardour, impatient of any 
estimation falling short of high- water mark. 

The story of the Comb-Builders, however, sets 
none of the usual pitfalls in the way of the over- 
enthusiastic penman. In its soberest incident and 
least important detail it is so wonderful, that ex- 
uberance of language is as powerless to exaggerate, 
as a niggardly tongue to minimise, its true and due 
effect. If the ordering of the bee-commonwealth — 
the intricate systems of sanitation, division of labour, 
treatment of the queen and worker-larvae, and the 
like — is subject for marvel, and seems infallibly to 
denote the possession of high faculties, a much 
greater degree of acumen must be conceded to the 



1 36 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

worker-bee, when we come to consider her as the 
designer and builder of honeycomb. 

It is here that she shines in her most significant 
light. The complicated structures with which she 
fills the bee-city do not call for unwearying toil 
alone : they could never have been fashioned unless 
the combined arts of engineer, architect, and mathe- 
matician had been brought to bear on them. Nor 
are they merely simple constructive and mathe- 
matical problems which the honey-bee is called upon 
to face ; nor, though difficult, unvarying, and so 
amenable to instinctive solution. In almost every 
comb built we see special and necessarily unforeseen 
difficulties met and triumphantly overcome. In 
the construction of the six-sided cell, with its base 
composed of three rhombs or diamonds, the bee has 
adopted a form which our greatest arithmeticians 
admit to be the best possible for her requirements, 
and she endeavours to keep to this form wherever 
practicable. But it constantly happens, in her work 
of comb-building, that local conditions interfere 
with her plans ; and then she will make five-sided 
cells, or square cells* or triangular, or any other 
form, just as the need impels her. It is a facile, 
comfortably finite thing to put all this down to a 
mysterious essence called instinct, with which the 
organism of the bee has been divinely dosed, as men 
serve electricity to a leyden-jar. But it was not 
instinct that made Wren put the steel cable round 
the dome of St. Paul's, nor instinct that lifted the 
crown-stones to the top of the Great Pyramids. 
These are works of a creature more highly equipped 
and instigated ; yet their supremacy is all of a piece 
with the honeycomb, which is made of a material 
fragile, light as air, but which, by the art of the 
bee, becomes capable not only of supporting, but 
of suspending a weight thirty times as great as its 
own. 

That the bee does not collect her building materials, 
but derives them from her own body, is a fact that 



THE COMB-BUILDERS 13; 

has come to light only within the last hundred and 
fifty years or so, although several shrewd guesses at 
the truth are to be found in the works of the mediaeval 
bee-masters. The wasp, who has much of the in- 
genuity of the honey-bee, but is doomed to exercise 
it in a far more humble direction, makes a six-sided 
cell ; but her matter is collected from outside, and 
can only be put to comparatively simple uses, as it is 
incapable of bearing tensile strain. Beeswax alone, 
of all constructive materials in the world, seems to 
meet every requirement. It can be worked into 
plates as thin as the T i<rth part of an inch, which is the 
normal thickness of the cell-wall. It is indestructible 
to all the elements save heat. It can be rendered 
soft and easily workable, or allowed to harden, while 
still retaining its suppleness and life. It is a bad 
conductor of heat, and therefore conserves the heat 
of the hive. Vermin do not prey upon it : so far as 
is known there is only one creature that will eat it — 
a peculiar kind of moth-larva, against which, how- 
ever, a strong stock can always hold its own. And 
then, as the raw materials for its production are 
secretions of the bee's own body, the work of preparing 
it can be carried on when darkness or stress of weather 
have put an end, for the time being, to work out of 
doors. 

The first labour undertaken by a swarm, directly 
it has gained possession of its new quarters, is the 
building of combs. The apparent revulsion of feeling 
which succeeds the excitement of swarming soon 
passes off, and the energies of the whole party are at 
once concentrated on furnishing and victualling the 
new hive. The older bees commence foraging, each 
bee as she goes forth hovering a moment with her 
head towards the hive, to fix its location and appear- 
ance in her memory. By far the greater portion, 
however, remain at home and unite in a dense cluster 
for wax-making. Time is everything in these first 
operations of the new colony. The queen, with whom 
egg-laying has probably been suspended for a day 



138 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

past, or even longer, is overburdened with fecundity, 
and must be supplied with thousands of brood-cells 
without delay. The foragers will be coming home 
laden with nectar and pollen, and will need instant 
storage-room. Wax must be made with all possible 
expedition, and the young bees crowd together in 
the roof of the hive, with their queen snug and warm 
in their midst. 

No doubt one of the chief reasons why swarming 
bees unite themselves in the solid pendant mass of 
the cluster so soon after leaving the parent-hive, is to 
hasten this process of wax-formation. It has been 
proved that wax is most easily generated under the 
influence of great heat, and this is well secured in the 
heart of the cluster. By the time the scouts have 
decided on the new home, and the swarm must rise 
again on the wing, a great number of the bees will 
have their wax-pockets filled, and will be ready for 
the work of comb-making. When a swarm is hived, 
even if it be only a short time after its issue, the little 
white wax-scales can be seen protruding from the 
armour- joints of many of the bees, and these are often 
dropped and lost in the general confusion. 

One of the most difficult things to observe in bee- 
life is the actual process of comb-building. The crush 
is so great, and the movement of the bees so incessant, 
that at first the comb seems to grow of itself rather 
than be made by the busy multitude, for ever obscur- 
ing it from the watcher's eyes, or giving him but the 
rarest glimpse now and then of its white, delicate 
frailty of pattern. These early efforts of the comb- 
builders, produced as they are under forced circum- 
stances, are occasionally faulty of design, as though 
hastily knocked together. Sometimes the first groups 
of cells made by a swarm will have a yellow, moist, 
spon y appearance, with thick, irregular walls, and 
are obviously little more than temporary vats to 
hold the incoming nectar until the proper honey-cells 
can be constructed. This emergency-comb is speci- 
ally interesting, as affording one more instance of the 



THE COMB-BUILDERS 139 

worker-bee's ever-ready resource in the presence of 
difficulties. In the ordinary way the mason-bee 
hangs quietly in the cluster until her wax-secreting 
organs have done their work, and the six little oblong 
scales of brittle material are ready for manipulation. 
These protrude from under the hard plates of her 
abdomen, three on each side, looking much like half- 
posted letters. At one of the knee-joints of her hind- 
leg she has a peculiar implement, of which there is 
not the slightest trace in the queen-bee. This is like 
a pair of nippers, but instead of two converging 
points, it is furnished on ona side with a row of sharp, 
stiff bristles, and on the other with a shallow spoon. 
With this special tool the worker-bee grips the wax- 
scale, and draws it out of its pocket. It is then 
transferred to her jaws, and she hurries off with it to 
the comb-building. Arrived at an unfinished cell, 
she sets to work to chew up the raw wax into a paste, 
incorporating it with her saliva, and materially in- 
creasing its bulk. The resulting soft, ductile matter 
is then applied to the work, and moulded into its 
needed shape. In this way, with hundreds of workers 
going and coming, the delicate white fabric of brood 
and honey-comb is built up with extraordinary 
rapidity. 

How the coarse, spongy comb, which swarms will 
sometimes manufacture, is produced cannot be de- 
finitely stated. It has all the appearance of having 
been made from raw wax, hurriedly masticated and 
kneaded up with honey, and probably this is its 
actual composition. The secretion from the salivary 
gland, is necessarily slow, and with time pressing 
and a horde of impatient foragers dinning about her 
ears, eager to unload and be oif again to the clover, 
the ingenious mason-bee appears to have hit on the 
idea of using the contents of her honey-sac as a 
substitute. Nothing, however, but a mechanical 
admixture can take place between honey and the raw 
wax. This dissolves only under the influence of the 
bee's saliva, which has intensely acid properties. 



i 4 o THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

To understand all that the bees have accomplished 
when a new empty hive has been filled throughout 
with waxen comb, it is necessary to follow the opera- 
tions of the swarm pretty closely during the first few 
weeks of its separate life. It is a big undertaking, 
the building of an entire, new bee-city, and the 
problems that confront the builders are many and 
complicated. In the first place, whether she ever 
attains it or not, the worker-bee will aim at nothing 
short of perfection. Hereditary experience tells her 
exactly what are the home-requirements of the 
colony, and she now sets to work to fulfil them in 
the best imaginable way. 

A city is to be built which is to accommodate 
twenty or thirty thousand individuals. Vast nur- 
sery-quarters must be constructed, as there may be 
as many as ten or twelve thousand youngsters to 
cradle at one and the same time. For at least six 
months of the year no food will be obtainable from 
outside, so that the city must contain large store- 
houses capable of holding more than a six months* 
supply. As the temperature in winter can be kept 
up only by the bodily warmth of the inhabitants, 
life in the city must be concentrated into the smallest 
possible space ; and the materials of which the city 
is built must be heat-conserving, while its construc- 
tion must allow of perfect ventilation at all times, 
and in summer it must permit a free circulation of 
air, that the surplus heat can be readily carried off. 
The city must be a fortress as well as a home, and 
be closed in on every side as a protection against its 
many enemies, as well as the weather. 

There is another, and just as vital a condition 
governing its construction — the necessity for strict 
economy in material. If there were any natural 
substance having the qualities of tenacity, lightness, 
ductility, and strength which the bees could obtain 
out of doors instead of wax, no doubt they would 
use it for comb-building, and they would not spend 
hours of precious time and consume large quantities 



, 



THE COMB-BUILDERS 141 

of hard-won stores in the manufacture of their own 
material. But it seems there is nothing in nature 
possessing the needful properties. Bees collect a 
resinous substance, notably from the buds of the 
poplar, which they use for stopping up crevices. 
They dilute this also into a varnish, with which they 
paint the finished combs, and sometimes even com- 
bine it with wax to form a rough filling ; but it 
appears to be useless in cell-construction. The whole 
city must needs be made of wax, and wax alone ; and 
the bees are as careful of this precious substance as a 
miser of his gold. 

Starting with these conditions — efficient house 
accommodation for the colony secured at the least 
cost in time, labour, and material — the bee tackles 
the problem before her with an ingenuity that is little 
short of astounding. She appears to begin with the 
central dominant unit of the difficulty, and to work 
outward, vanquishing subsidiary problems as she 
goes. Her line of reasoning seems to run somewhat 
in this way. To raise the young, and store the honey, 
there is needed some kind of cell or receptacle. The 
young larvae being cylindrical in form, a cylindrical 
cell is indicated ; and this shape will serve also for 
the honey-barrels. Not a few, however, but many 
thousands of these vessels will be required : they 
must therefore be placed close together, as well for 
economy of space as for natural warmth. The cells 
could be grouped together mouth upwards in hori- 
zontal planes, storey above storey ; but such a 
method of construction would be economically un- 
sound. To prevent sagging in the heat of the hive, 
and under the weight they will be called to bear, the 
cell-bases would have to be thickened collectively 
into a substantial floor, which would need shoring-up 
at intervals — after the manner of the wasps. But 
in this, much valuable material would be diverted 
from its proper use. Obviously, a better plan would 
be to lay all the cells on their sides, and pile them 
up into a vertical wall. And, just as obviously, is 

F 



142 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

two walls of these super-imposed cells were placed 
back to back, so that one central vertical sheet of wax 
would serve to stop the ends of all the cells, right and 
left, a saving of half the material used for the cell- 
bottoms would at once be effected. 

But, so far, the design is still only in its crude, 
initial stage. The upright comb, consisting of a 
double pile of round cells, back to back, with one 
flat base between, although a great advance on the 
single sheet of horizontal cells, is yet mechanically 
and economically deficient. The round cells leave 
useless interstices, which take much wax in the 
filling ; while the flat bottoms do not coincide with 
the form of the larvae, and thus still more space is 
wasted. Clearly, improvement can only come by 
altering the shape of the cell ; and now the bee 
seems to have asked herself — and triumphantly an- 
swered — an extremely complex question. 

She knew how much internal cell-space each larva 
required for growth. The problem, therefore, was 
this : of what shape, nearly approaching the cylin- 
drical, ought such a cell to be made, which would 
ensure the right dimensions, but which would occupy 
the least possible room, have the greatest possible 
strength, consume the least possible material in its 
manufacture, and possess the property that a number 
of similar cells could be built up in a double vertical 
plane, leaving no interstices either between the cells 
or between the planes ? 

There is only one solution to this problem ; and 
the honey-bee found it — who shall say how many 
ages ago ?-— in the hexagon cell, with its base com- 
posed of three rhombs. 

The whole astounding ingenuity of the thing can 
only be realised when a piece of nearly perfect, new- 
made, virgin-comb has been closely examined. It 
will be at once seen that the hexagon cells combine 
together over the surface of the comb in absolute 
geometrical union, and that the six-sided form is 
round enough for all practical purposes. Looking 



THE COMB-BUILDERS 143 

into the cells on one side of the comb, it will be noted 
that their bases take the form of depressed pyramids, 
each made up of three diamond-shaped planes. 
Turning the comb over, we see that the cells on this 
side also have pyramidal bottoms. If the depth of 
a cell on one side of the comb be taken, and added 
to the depth of a cell on the other side, and then the 
width of the whole comb be measured, it will be 
found that the combined depth of the two cells 
perceptibly exceeds the width of the whole comb. 
At first glance this seems like a case of the less in- 
cluding the greater, which is a manifest impossibility. 
But, holding the comb up to the light, a further 
discovery is made, and the seeming paradox is 
eliminated. The bottoms of the cells are so thin as 
to be almost transparent, and it is at once seen that 
the cells are not built end to end, in line, but that 
each cell-base on one side of the comb covers part of 
three cell-bases on the other. If the three diamonds, 
composing between them the triangular base of a 
single cell, be perforated with a needle, and the comb 
turned over, it will be found that the three perfora- 
tions come each in a separate cell. Thus the saving 
in the total width of the comb is effected by allowing 
the pyramidal bases on each side to engage alternately 
like the teeth of a trap ; instead of meeting point- 
blank, they overlap each other, and the faces of the 
pyramids are so contrived that each of them helps to 
close two cells. 

There is another advantage in this arrangement 
which will be immediately obvious. The apex and 
three ribs of each pyramidal cell-base form founda- 
tion-lines for the cell-walls on the other side of the 
comb. This means that not only do all cell- walls 
abut on an arch, but that every cell-base is strength- 
ened throughout by a triple girdering. The result is 
that the amount of wax required in the construction 
of the comb can be everywhere reduced to an absolute 
minimum. It becomes merely a question of what 
thickness of wax will retain the honey; and this 
f 2 



t44 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

experience proves to be no more than T hr part of an 
inch. The whole thing, indeed, might very well be 
taken as an ideal exemplar of the triumph of mind 
over matter. 

The geometric principles brought into play in the 
construction of honey-comb have been a favourite 
study with mathematicians of all ages, and especially 
this rhombiform method adopted by the bee in floor- 
ing her cells. The rhomb is best described as a 
plane-figure whose four sides are equal, like those of 
a square, but whose angles are not right angles. In 
such a figure there are necessarily two greater angles 
and two smaller, facing each other in pairs. The 
three rhombs composing the base of the honey-cell 
lean together, as has been seen, in the form of a 
blunt pyramid ; and— treating all angles as negligible 
factors — the bluntness of this pyramid is found to 
coincide very aptly with the shape of the full-grown 
larvae. But this is not the only reason for the par- 
ticular inclination given by the bee to the rhombs 
forming the base of each cell. Economy rules here, 
as in everything else she undertakes ; and the truth 
that she has chosen the one and only form of cell- 
base which takes the least possible material to con- 
struct has received very striking confirmation. 

The story is an old and famous one, but it will 
bear repeating. A great naturalist once put him- 
self to an infinity of trouble in measuring the angles 
formed by the rhombs in a vast number of comb- 
cell bases, and he found that these showed remark- 
able uniformity. It will be clear that the hollow 
pyramid of the cell-bottom will be either deep or 
shallow, according to the shape of the three rhombs 
composing it. The apex of the pyramid is formed 
by the meeting of three equal angles, one from each 
rhomb ; and it is plain that this apex will be sharp or 
blunt, according to whether the meeting angles are 
wide or narrow. It was, of course, impossible to 
ascertain the dimensions of these angles with abso- 
lutely microscopical nicety ; but, dealing only with the 



THE COMB-BUILDERS i 4S 

most perfect comb, the naturalist found that the two 
greater angles in the rhombs measured very nearly 
no°, and the two lesser angles 70°, He also found 
that the angles formed by the conjunction of the 
cell-sides with the bases had the same dimensions 
as those of the rhombs. Assuming therefore that, 
mathematically, the angles of the rhombs and cell-sides 
should be equal, he was able to calculate exactly 
the angles for which the bees were evidently striving 
in the construction of the rhombs — 109 28' and 

70 3*'- 

Another bee-lover scientist, ruminating over these 
figures, was much impressed by them, and determined 
to find out the reason why the bee made such con- 
stant choice of this particular shape of rhomb. He 
therefore conceived the idea of submitting the bee's 
judgment on this cell-base question to an indepen- 
dent authority. Without disclosing his object, he 
propounded the following problem to one of the 
greatest mathematicians of the day. 

" Supposing," said he, in effect, " you were re- 
quired to close the end of an hexagonal vessel by 
three rhombs or diamond-shaped plates, what angles 
must be given to these rhombs so that the greatest 
amount of space would be enclosed by the least 
amount of material ? " 

It was a difficult problem, but the mathematician 
worked it out at last, and his answer was " 109 26' 
and 70 34"'. 

Now, the difference between the calculation of the 
man and the calculation of the bee was an exceed- 
ingly small one. No one thought of calling into 
question the work of the man, who was pre-eminent 
in his world of figures. It was therefore accepted 
as a fact that the bee had made a trifling mistake — 
so trifling, however, that, in the matter of comb- 
building, it was of no importance. Her reputation 
was unimpaired : to all intents and purposes the 
honey-cell was still a perfect example of utmost 
capacity secured by least material. 



146 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

But another mathematician — a Scotsman this time 
— went over the whole business again and he proved 
conclusively that the bee was right, while the first 
mathematician was wrong. He showed that the 
true answer to the problem of the angles was 109 
28' and yo° 32' — identically the figures obtained by 
estimation of the honey-comb. 

In the foregoing pages the principles involved 
in the construction of honey-comb have been gone 
into rather minutely, because it is here that the lines 
of thought between the old and the new naturalists 
seem to make a typical divergence. Both schools 
are, in the main, agreed on the point that all forms 
of life emanate from the one omnipotent source ; 
and it matters little whether we speak of the vast 
periods of time, during which the creation of all 
things was effected, as ages, or under the old Biblical 
metaphor of days. But whereas the old school 
appears to insist on different qualities of life — im- 
mortal soul in man, and a mystic, sub-conscious, 
perishable thing called instinct in the brute creation 
— the new school is unable to see any distinction 
between the intellectual equipment of man and brute, 
but that of degree. Between the honey-bee and her 
masters there is indeed a great gulf fixed, but it is 
conceivably not unbridgeable. And unless we are 
determined at all cost of logical violence to force a 
favourite set of square opinions into the round holes of 
observed fact, it is difficult to see how the old position 
is long to remain tenable. 

With regard to this particular question of comb- 
building, an attempt is still being made to show that 
it is entirely due to the working of certain natural 
laws, and is independent of any intelligence or volition 
which the bees are supposed to exercise. We are 
told that the cells are always begun in a circular form, 
but that they afterwards assume the hexagon shape 
quite automatically, in obedience to the laws of 
mutual interference and pressure. As a proof of this, 



THE COMB-BUILDERS 147 

it/ is pointed out that the outside cells of the comb, 
not being subject to these laws, are usually more or 
less rounded. 

The pressure-theory is hardly worth serious con- 
sideration, as it is obvious that the growth of a honey- 
comb is perfectly free and untrammelled in every 
way. If the bee makes her comb-cells with six sides 
and a pyramidal base unthinkingly, and under the 
yoke of imperious obligation, it is certainly not be- 
cause the cells force this shape upon one another, 
like Buffon's peas in a bottle. 

And if we believe that the bee works blindly under 
the law of mutual interference, any close examination 
of the results of her work must bring us to the con- 
viction that we are only putting aside one marvel 
for something more wonderful still. For then we see 
a natural law taking on a very unnatural quality — 
that of intelligent adaptation to circumstances. 
The comb, intended for use in the hive-nursery, is 
made in two sizes. That used for cradling the worker- 
brood has cells measuring £ inch across, and a fraction 
less than £ inch deep, while that designed for raising 
the drone-larvae is built up of cells having a diameter 
of £ inch, and a depth of about f inch. These differ- 
ent-sized cells are not mingled indiscriminately over 
the comb, but are grouped together in large blocks. 
Some of the combs will be entirely composed of 
worker-cells, which are always in the vast majority ; 
other combs will be made up of both kinds. 

The bees begin a comb by attaching a small block 
of wax to the roof of the hive. On either side of 
this they hollow out depressions, which become the 
bases of the first cells. The work is then extended 
downwards and sideways, the cell-bases being multi- 
plied in all directions as fast as possible, so that there 
are a great number of unfinished cells in progress long 
before the walls of the first cells have been completed. 
There is a very reasonable motive for this procedure. 
When a house is being built, as much of the founda- 
tions as possible are laid in at the commencement, 



148 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

to allow a large body of bricklayers to get to work 
on the walls at the same time ; and the bee extends 
her comb-foundations on the same principle. 

When about half the comb has been finished for 
worker-brood it may be decided to commence build- 
ing drone-cells. As the bases of the drone-cells are 
larger than those of the worker-cells, it follows that 
a change must be effected in the ground-plan of the 
comb. The bees prepare for this transition very 
cleverly, evidently studying how the regularity of 
the comb may be least interrupted. Sometimes the 
change is contrived without any appreciable loss 
of space, but more often several misshapen cells have 
to be made before the symmetrical progress of the 
comb is resumed. This depends largely on the 
inherited skill of the bees, which varies according 
to their strain, as all experienced bee-keepers know. 

Now, if the work of comb-building is carried 
through by the bees under blind compulsion of the 
natural laws .of mutual interference and pressure, 
what other law, it may be asked, interferes with 
these in turn when the transition from one size of 
cell to another must be made ? If it is all a sort 
of crystallisation going on independently of the bees' 
will or wish, it appears more than curious that the 
mill should grind large or small, just as the needs 
of the hive demand it. 

But the whole position is really little else than 
a flagrant example of the evils of argument from a 
simile. Soaked peas in a bottle will swell to hexagons, 
or rather, dodecahedrons, by the law of mutual 
interference. Soap-bubbles will do the same with 
no more constriction than their own weight. But 
peas and bubbles are things self-contained and separ- 
ately existing, before being brought together. If the 
bees made a vast number of separate, round cells, 
and then combined them simultaneously, no doubt 
all but the outside cells would assume the hexagon 
form. But the essence of the whole art and ingen- 
uity of comb-building lies in the fact that there is no 



THE COMB-BUILDERS 149 

such thing as a separate cell. Each single compart- 
ment in the comb shares its parts with no less than 
nine other compartments. And to talk of mutual 
interference when there is no separate existence is 
ploughing the sands indeed. 

There are other circumstances connected with the 
work of the comb-builders which go far to confirm 
the position that bees do exercise reason, and that of 
a high order. It has been said that the interior of 
a hive in day-time is not altogether deprived of light. 
Probably, during the hours of greatest activity, the 
bees have always enough light to see their way about 
by means of their wonderful indoor-eyes, which, 
under the microscope, have all the solemn wisdom 
of an owl's. It is a fact, however, that comb-build- 
ing is usually carried on at night-time, when other 
employments are in temporary abeyance. Possibly 
the — to our eyes — profoundest darkness may be no 
darkness at all to the bees ; but, to all appearances, 
as we can judge of them, honey-comb is virtually 
made in the dark. 

But combs are built side by side, often simultane- 
ously. They grow downwards together, yet always 
preserve their right distance apart ; so that, when 
finished, there will be an intervening gangway be- 
tween the sealed surfaces of about a quarter of an 
inch, which is just enough to allow the two streams 
of bees to pass each other, back to back. How are 
these distances preserved, seeing that the bees at 
work on the bottom edge of each comb are separated 
by a space of, perhaps, an inch and a half of empty 
darkness ? 

A simple experiment will at once give a clue to 
this. If a hive, in which a swarm has constructed 
about half its depth of comb, be canted a little 
sideways, so as to throw the combs out of the per- 
pendicular, and the hive be then left for several 
days, it will be found on examination that all build- 
ing, from the moment of disturbance, has followed 
on the new line of vertically. The combs will all 



ISO THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

be slightly bent to one side. This means either that 
the bees have a natural sense of the perpendicular, 
or that they work by the plumb-line, as humanity 
is constrained to do. The fact seems to be that the 
hanging cluster of wax-making bees performs the 
office of a living plummet, and really guides the comb 
in its downward progress. 

Yet, do bees always suspend their combs ? Do 
they never construct a waxen storehouse, raising it 
tier above tier from the floor of the hive, after the 
system of the more intelligent creature, Man ? 

The first commentary on this is, that such a 
departure from their common methods would be no 
improvement, but a retrograde step. These long 
comb-walls of the bees have a close analogy to the 
modern transatlantic sky-scraper building. The 
trouble with all such buildings is to provide them 
with sufficient base for their height. If American 
engineers had at their disposal a material of adequate 
tensile strength, and there were anything in nature 
to hang them from, it would be, scientifically, a 
better plan to suspend these buildings than to erect 
them, because the house would then naturally tend 
to keep its verticality, and the base-problem would 
cease to exist. On the same principle the bees, 
having at hand a material of almost ideal tensility, 
and a suitable hanging-beam, wisely suspend their 
heavily weighted combs from the roof, instead of 
erecting them, like certain kinds of ant-structures. 

But it is undoubtedly long racial experience, and 
not inability to follow the humanly approved method, 
that guides them here. Rarely — so rarely that the 
writer, in the course of many years spent among bees, 
has seen only three examples of it — bees will build 
comb upwards, if circumstances will allow no other 
way. And this would seem not only to drive the 
last coffin-nail for the poor instinct-theory, but to 
carve its epitaph as well. 

In one of the instances referred to, a glass-bottomed 
box had been inverted over the feed-hole of a common 



THE COMB-BUILDERS 151 

hive, and had there remained forgotten. As the season 
progressed, the hive grew great with bees and honey, 
and it became imperative to build additional store- 
comb in the box overhead. But its slippery glass 
roof would give no foothold to the builders. Time 
and again they must have tried to get upon it, with 
their wax-hods filled and ready, and each time failed : 
the ordinary way of comb-building was clearly im- 
possible. Then the engineers of the hive, inspired 
by the difficulty, got to work in another way. On 
the wooden surface below they laid out the plan of 
a garner-house, not after their usual method of 
parallel combs, but a regular, oblong house, with 
cellular storerooms, and communicating passages in 
between. Upon this they raised story above story 
of horizontal cells, until the glass roof was nearly 
reached. At this stage, apparently, the honey-flow 
came to an end in the fields, for the cells in the store- 
house were never sealed, though all were nearly full 
of honey ; and later in the season it was found and 
carried away by the bee-master, who still preserves it 
as a curiosity. He bears a well-known name,* and 
his testimony as to the making of this unique little 
honey - house is beyond question ; but, indeed, it 
carries in itself infallible evidence of its authenticity. 
All honey-cells made by bees have a slight upward 
inclination, which helps, as has been already explained, 
to retain their contents until they can be capped over. 
And every cell in the storehouse clearly showed this 
upward slant. 



CHAPTER XIII 

WHERE THE BEE SUCKS 

IT is characteristic of those unlettered in bee- 
craft that they are often afraid when there is 
no danger, and will venture with the intrepidity 

* Dr. Herbert MacDonald Phillpotts, of Kingswear, Devon, 



152 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

that is born of ignorance where old experienced bee- 
keepers fear to tread. 

Temper in bees is one of the most variable qualities 
in a creature made up of variabilities. There are 
times, when a summer storm is threatening and the 
air is charged with electricity, when to go among the 
bees is to court certain disaster ; and there are other 
times, such as the full height of the honey-flow, when 
almost any liberties can be taken with bees, without 
fear of reprisals. And yet this is not always the rule. 
Much depends on their lineage and the purity of the 
strain, and, again, on the systems of the bee-master. 
Bees respond as readily as any other form of domestic 
stock to wise and considerate treatment. Handled 
in a firm, quiet, deliberate way, the most vicious 
colony can often be dealt with in perfect safety ; 
while the mildest-natured bees will commonly meet 
fumbling indexterity with a prompt challenge to war. 

Since the Italian bee was brought to England, some 
half-century ago, there is no doubt that the original 
English strain has been greatly modified. Some 
authorities, indeed, question whether there are any 
absolutely pure British bees left at all. The golden 
girdles of the Italian crop up in the most unlikely 
places, and the foreign blood seems to have got into 
the race in all but the remotest parts of the country. 
One must regret, although it is a vain regret now, 
that these undesirable aliens were ever allowed to 
set foot on the soil. Whatever naturally survives 
and thrives in a particular country, must be the most 
suitable thing for that country ; and these southern 
races of the honey-bee seem to have brought back, 
to the detriment of our own stock, idiosyncrasies long 
ago bred out of the native race. Much of the nervous 
irritability and proneness to disease visible in the 
honey-bee of to-day is more or less directly traceable 
to the introduction of foreign blood ; and the grand 
special advantage of the Italian bee — its much 
vaunted and widely advertised possession of a long 
tongue — has proved an entire myth. Numberless 



WHERE THE BEE SUCKS 153 

measurements undertaken by our leading scientific 
apiarians have proved that the Italian bee has a 
tongue no longer than any other, although most are 
willing to concede her the possession of a very long 
and ready sting indeed. But here we do her an 
injustice : a pure-bred Italian worker-bee is as good 
or as bad tempered as any other of her species. It 
is the first crosses with the native bee which display 
so much vindictive aggressiveness, and have given to 
the whole race its general bad name. 

In the time of the great honey-flow — which in 
southern England begins in May, early or late, ac- 
cording to the season, and may endure for six weeks 
— it is a common thing in the country to see people 
turn back from the footpaths, running through the 
white-clover or sainfoin fields, because of the huge 
and terrifying uproar made by the foraging bees. 
When there is a large acreage under these crops, and 
the day is a fair one, this note reaches a volume hardly 
to be credited as a sound of work and peace. It is 
much more like the din of a great bee-war, and it is 
small wonder that the stranger, unlearned in the ways 
of the hives, should fear to go through what is very 
like a scene of battle and carnage. 

And yet there is no time of year when the honey- 
bee is so little inclined to molest her human fellow- 
creatures as this. So long as the honey-weather holds 
— the warm nights when the nectar is secreted, and 
the rainless days when it can be gathered — she can 
hardly be induced to attack, even if her home is being 
turned inside out, and the sudden sunlight riddling its 
darkness through and through. 

Until within comparatively recent years it was 
universally believed that honey was a pure, un- 
touched secretion from the flowers ; and that beyond 
gathering and storing it the bee had no part in its 
production. This idea, however, is a wholly mistaken 
one. Honey is a manufactured article, and differs in 
almost every way from the raw juices obtained from 
the various flower-crops. The nectar of flowers, 



154 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

before collection by the bee, seems to have hardly any 
of the constituents of ripe honey. Three-quarters of 
its bulk consists of plain water, in which about 20 per 
cent, of cane-sugar is dissolved, the rest being made 
up of essential oils and gums, which give it its dis- 
tinctive flavour. But mature honey contains very 
little water, certainly never more than a sixth part of 
its bulk. Its sugar is almost entirely grape-sugar. 
It is decidedly acid, while the nectar is always neutral. 
And the oils and aromatic principles of the flower- 
juices are matured and developed into the well-known 
honey flavour, which is like nothing else in the 
world. 

It is certain that the process of manufacture begins 
directly the bee draws the nectar from the flower-cup. 
As the liquid passes into the honey-sac it is mingled 
with the acid secretion from the gland at the base of 
the tongue. When the bee reaches the hive she does 
not pour her burden direct into the cells, but passes it 
on to one of the house-bees, who conveys it to the 
honey-vats. It is even probable that the nectar is 
transferred a second time before it reaches the cell, 
although this point is still undecided. The effect of 
such transference is to add more acid properties to the 
original juice. 

The honey seems to undergo a regular brewing 
process within the hive. It is kept at a temperature 
of about 8o° or 8$°, and it is then that the surplus 
water passes off into vapour. In this way the raw 
nectar loses at least two-thirds of its natural bulk 
before it is finally converted into honey. It is said 
that at the last moment, just before each cell is 
stopped with an impervious covering of wax, the bee 
turns herself about, and injects into the honey a drop 
of the poison from her sting ; but there seems to be 
not the slightest evidence in support of this. The 
contents of the poison-sac are, it is true, mainly formic 
acid, which is a strong preservative ; and undoubtedly 
traces of formic acid are to be found in all honeys. It 
has been, however, conclusively proved that this acid 



WHERE THE BEE SUCKS 155 

finds its way into the honey from the glandular system 
of the bee, and not through its sting. 

The industry of the bee in nectar- gathering has 
always been a stock subject for wonder, and it is 
commonly supposed that she is born with full instinc- 
tive capabilities for her task. A little observation, 
however, soon tends to upset this theory. The work 
of foraging has to be learnt step by step, like every 
other species of skilled work in hive-life. The young 
bee, setting out on her first flight, has all the will to 
do well, and her imitative faculty is strongly de- 
veloped ; but she seems to have very little else. Her 
first experiences are a succession of blunders. She 
appears not to know for certain where to look for the 
coveted sweets, and can be seen industriously search- 
ing the most unlikely places — crevices in walls, tufts 
of grass, or the leaves of a plant instead of its flowers. 
The fact that the nectar is hidden deep down in the 
cup of the flower, beyond its pollen-bearing mechan- 
ism, seems to dawn upon her only after much thought 
and many fruitless essays. 

It has been proved that bees will go as far as two or 
even three miles in their foraging journeys. The 
distance seems to vary according to the nature of the 
country. Bees in hilly districts appear to venture 
only short distances from home, while in flat country 
the foraging flights are more extended. A bee-line 
has become proverbial for a straight course, but it is 
doubtful whether the bee ever makes a perfectly direct 
flight from point to point. The truth seems to be 
that there are well-defined air-paths out from and 
home to every bee-garden, and that these are con- 
tinually thronged with bees going and returning 
throughout the working hours of the day. These 
aerial thoroughfares lie high above all but the tallest 
obstacles, so high indeed that the keenest sight will 
reveal nothing. Only the busy song of the travellers 
can be heard, like a river of music, far overhead. 

In the South Down country, where the isolated 
farms are each surrounded with their compact acreage 



156 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

of blossoming sheep-feed, and there is nothing but 
empty miles of close-cropped turf between, these bee- 
roads in the air can be easily found and studied. 
Walking over the springy, undulating grass in the 
quiet of a summer's morning, a faint, far-off note 
breaks suddenly upon you like the twang of a harp- 
string high up in the blue. A step or two onward and 
you lose it ; retracing your path, it peals out again. 
You can see nothing, strain your eyes as you will ; 
but its cause is evident, and with a little trying you 
can presently make out the main direction of the 
flight, and see down in the hollow far below, the 
huddled roofs of a farmstead with a patchwork of 
fields about it, white with clover, or rose-red with 
sainfoin in fullest bloom. 

Perhaps there is no honey in the world so fine as 
that to be obtained from these solitary Downland 
settlements. With the ordinary consumer honey is 
merely honey, and there is an end of the matter. 
But the beeman knows that the quality of honey 
varies as greatly as that of wine. He will tell you 
at first taste the crop from which it is gathered, 
whether it has one source or many, whether it is 
all flower-essence, or has been contaminated by the 
hateful honeydew, which is not honey at all. Down 
in the lowlands, except at certain rare seasons when 
only one crop is in flower, it is next to impossible to 
get honey absolutely from a single source. But here 
on the hills the bees are not tempted by glowing 
gardens with their feeble, washy sweets ; nor are 
they led aside by the coarse-natured privet, or horse- 
chestnut, or sunflower. There is only one trencher 
to their banquet, but this is a vast, illimitable one. 
They have nothing to do but to wend out and 
home all day long between the hives and a single 
field. 

It is difficult to gauge with anything like approxi- 
mate truth the amount of honey that one flowering 
crop will yield. But probably, when all conditions 
are most favourable, every acre of Dutch clover will 



WHERE THE BEE SUCKS 157 

produce about five pounds of pure honey for each 
day it is left standing in full bloom. The nectar is 
obviously secreted by the flower as an attraction to 
the bee, who, blundering into it with her pollen- 
smothered body, unconsciously effects its fertilisation. 
Directly this object is gained, the flow of nectar in 
each particular floret appears to cease, and the bee 
passes it by. 

The student of old books on apiculture is often 
surprised to read so much in praise of honeydew, 
while in the modern bee-garden he hears of it nothing 
but hearty condemnation. He is told that directly 
the bees begin to gather honeydew the store-racks 
must be removed from the hives, or the good honey 
will be ruined both in colour and flavour. He is 
shown some dark, ill-looking, watery stuff carefully 
sealed up by the bees, and is informed that it is 
nearly all honeydew. But, he asks himself, can this 
be the same thing about which the old masters were 
led into such ardent eulogy ? The truth is that 
when ancient and mediaeval writers spoke of honey- 
dew, they used the word as a general term for all 
that the bees gathered. Honey was all a dew, 
divinely rained down from the skies j and it is en- 
tirely of a piece with the all but universal lack of 
bee-knowledge down almost to the beginning of the 
nineteenth century, that so few should have guessed 
that the flowers themselves had anything to do with 
the matter. Virgil and the rest of the classics held 
absolute sway over all minds pretending to the least 
culture, and even the naturalists seem to have studied 
the wild life around them with no other object than 
to force facts into line with ancient poetic fantasies. 
The old writers explained the varying qualities of 
honey as being due to the influence of whatever stars 
happened to be in the ascendant at the time of its 
gathering, and the honey was good or bad according 
to whether this was favourable or unfavourable. 

The quality and consistency of honey varies extra- 
ordinarily as between the different sources of true 



I SB THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

nectar ; but there is no doubt that honeydew well 
merits the evil name it has gained with modem bee- 
keepers. There are, perhaps, three hundred distinct 
kinds of aphides known to English naturalists, and 
all these eject the sweet liquid which, under certain 
conditions, bees are tempted to gather. TMs honey- 
dew varies in flavour according to the species of tree 
from whose sap it is derived. Probably much of it 
is only a sweet, slightly mawkish liquor, which, in 
its pure state, combines with the genuine honey 
without causing noticeable deterioration, at least 
to the unexpert taste and eye. But, unfortunately 
for bee-keepers, the oak is a great favourite with these 
parasites, no fewer than six varieties preying on this 
one tree alone. And oak-honeydew is a pestilent 
thing indeed. 

It is commonly supposed that the first cold nights; 
that mark the beginning of the end of the honey 
season, stimulate the production of honeydew; for 
it is after a chilly night that bees are usually seen at 
work on the trees where the aphides abound. A 
much more likely theory, however, is that the cold 
does not accelerate the secretion of the honeydew, 
but cuts off the more legitimate resources of the hive 
just when they are in fullest activity ; and so the 
huge armies of foragers are momentarily thrown out 
of work, and must seek new outlets for their energy. 
The secretion of true nectar takes place mainly at 
night, and requires a temperature of about 70 . 
Anything much lower than this means dearth on the 
morrow, no matter how fine and warm the weather 
may then prove. 

The dark colour of aphis-syrup — a very little of 
which will ruin for market the finest honey — seems 
to be due as much to foreign matter as to its natural 
evil character. There is a peculiar growth on the bark 
of many trees where aphides congregate, which is 
known as soot-fungus. This and the honeydew get 
mingled together in a Cimmerian slime, and, no doubt, 
the merest trace of it would serve to darken and spoil 



WHERE THE BEE SUCKS 159 

the purest honey. There seems to be no way for bee- 
keepers but to watch for the first chilly nights, as the 
honey-season draws towards its close ; and then to 
be up early and get the surplus honey-chambers off 
the hives, before the bees have had a chance to spoil 
them. But the bee is no desperately early riser, for 
all her lofty place in the moral-maxim books. She 
generally waits until the morning sun has drunk up 
the night dews, and warmed the flower-calyces, before 
getting down to her work in earnest. The very early 
bees that may sometimes be seen winging out into the 
first light of a summer's morning, are probably only 
water-carriers. The water-supply is the day's first 
and last care with each hive in the breeding season. 
Every bee-garden seems to have its regular watering- 
place, generally on the oozy margin of some neigh- 
bouring pond ; and here, in the early morning, and 
again towards late afternoon, the bees may be seen 
drinking in whole battalions, while the meridian hours 
of the day will find it all but deserted. Curiously, 
these water-fetching times coincide with the times 
when the nectar is least get-at-able, or when the supply 
is exhausted for the day ; which is another sidelight 
on honey-bee economics. 

To follow the bees through their honey-harvesting 
season is to review nearly the whole year's natural 
growth and life. In southern England the earliest 
nectar is drawn from the willows, which come into 
flower with late March, but hold back their sweets 
until the first space of fine hot weather comes flooding 
in the track of the chilly northern gales. Of willow- 
honey there may be much or little, according to the 
night-temperatures. Generally it goes by fits and 
starts. For a day or two here and there the trees may 
be crowded with bees, or they may be deserted for 
weeks together. Whenever the sun shines, indeed, the 
trees that stand up like torches of gold in the misty 
purple of budding woods, are always full of the singing 
multitude ; but these are only the pollen-gatherers. 
The nectar-bearing willows are far less showy. Their 



i6o THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

catkins are small, tight-girt tassels of green, and when 
a warm night has brought them into profit, they 
attract all the noisy minstrels for miles round. Bee- 
keepers generally seem to leave the willows out of 
their calculations as a source of honey, but in riverside 
districts, and in favourable seasons, they are not to be 
overlooked. It sometimes happens that April comes 
in with a succession of mild sunny days and warm 
nights, and then the hives may suddenly overflow with 
willow-honey. When the yellow catkins fade out of 
sight, the willows are apt to fade out of memory ; and 
it does not seem to be commonly known that the 
female catkins continue to secrete abundant nectar 
often up to the end of May. 

Good honey-years are scarce under the changing 
English skies ; yet Nature's design for the hive- 
people is obviously to give an unbroken succession 
of honey-yielding plants throughout the whole spring 
and summer, and pollen whenever a bright break of 
sunshine may lure them out of doors. The white- 
clover is seldom ready until the first week in June ; 
but, from the earliest willows in March until the last 
of the flowering seed-crops is down in late July, there 
is abundance of provender, if only the fickle sun will 
do its part in the matter. The clover, as farming goes 
nowadays, is the great main source of honey, in 
southern England at least ; but the connoisseurs are 
at variance as to what yields the absolute perfection 
of honey. Scotsmen are all of one mind, for a rare 
chance, in this ; and will hear of nothing but the 
heather, carefully discriminating between the bell- 
heather, which is good, and the ling-heather, which 
is immeasurably better. Yet there is a honey, or 
rather a honey-blend, which far outstrips them all, 
though it is as rare and almost as priceless as the once 
famous Comet vintages. It is to be had only when 
the apple-blossom and the hawthorn come into full 
flower together, and this is only when a chill April 
has delayed the one and a summer-like May has forced 
on the other. Then, to the mellow refinement of the 



THE DRONE AND HIS STORY 161 

apple-nectar, is added the delicate almond flavour of 
the hawthorn, and the resulting honey is easily the 
finest sweetmeat in the world. 

Wonder is often expressed that one of the most 
generally cultivated crops, the red-clover, is seldom 
visited by the honey-bee, although the bumble-bees 
fill it with their deep trombone-music at all times of 
the day. It is true that the tongue of the hive-bee 
cannot reach to the bottom of the long red-clover 
calyx, but this would not deter her if the nectar were 
worth the gathering. She would cut through the 
petal at its base, as she does with many other flowers, 
and so steal an effective march on her better capari- 
soned rival. But red-clover nectar is poor in con- 
sistency and coarse of flavour. When the main crop 
is in flower, it would yield a practically unlimited 
amount of honey, but this is just the time when the 
bee can employ herself more profitably elsewhere. 
After the red-clover has been cut, a second growth 
springs up, bearing flower-tubes less developed, and 
therefore shorter than those of the first crop. But 
now other and better sources of supply are rapidly 
failing. The bee — for whom, in prosperous times, 
nothing but the best is good enough— must revise her 
tastes to meet her necessities. At this time she is as 
busy as the rest in the red-clover fields. And when 
her clearer, sweeter note is heard there, mingling its 
contralto with the hoarser music of the bumble-bee, 
it is a token that the heyday of the year is past ; the 
honey-chambers must be taken ofl the hives without 
delay. 

CHAPTER XIV 

THE DRONE AND HIS STORY 

IT is true that all bee-keepers are enthusiasts, 
and true that long years spent in the com- 
panionship of the hives invariably create a fearless 
fellowship, a prime understanding between the 



162 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

bee-master and his legions. But it is equally true that 
the longer you study the nature of the honey-bee; 
the less enamoured you become of certain of her 
ways. 

In the minds of old bee-men there grows up, as 
the years glide, a sort of awe of her. She is so mani- 
festly a power, supreme in her little world. She is 
so courageous, resourceful, brainy. All the weak- 
nesses and compromises, and most of the pleasures, 
have long ago been driven out of her life, seemingly 
by her own act and will ; yet, in doing this, she has 
but refined the science of citizenship to its pure 
elements. Her entire unselfishness, her readiness 
to sacrifice her individual good for the good of the 
State, are as unquestionable as they are changeless. 
The hive-polity, taken as a whole, is so admirable, 
and compares so advantageously with certain human 
efforts in the same way, that you are apt to exalt 
all her qualities into virtues ; and to conclude that 
a far-seeing, wise benevolence must have gone 
to the making of the perfect Bee-State, instead of 
the cold, undeviating logic that alone has fashioned 
it. 

This remorseless smelting-down of life into the set 
moulds of principle; without mercy and without 
reproach, has a cumulative effect on the mind of the 
observer • and sooner or later, though he will early 
lose his fear of her sting, he will develop a very 
real, but vague, awe of the honey-bee in another 
way. 

Just as Moses Rusden, the King's bee-master, held 
up the life of the hive as Nature's evidence of the 
Divine will in earthly monarchy, so the latter-day 
student is often constrained to ask himself whether 
the bee-commonwealth does not point an authorita- 
tive moral in another way. Here is a State—only 
a mimic one, but still not a negligible example — 
where several of the most fiercely-debated questions 
of modern human life are seen in long adopted and 
perfected working-order, and seen in their fullness 



THE DRONE AND HIS STORY 163 

of result. Any attempt at a serious comparison 
between men and women, and the drone and 
worker-bee, would justly lay the writer open to the 
charge of grotesque trifling j but there is more than 
a fanciful analogy between the principles on which 
all civilisations must be based, whether they are 
insect or human. It cannot be denied that the 
communal life of the honey-bee is a high civilisation ; 
that it has grown to be what it is to-day through ages 
of necessity ; that the one sex has the other under 
a complete and terrible subjection, for which, and 
for the privilege of all power, the dominant sex has 
paid a terrible price. 

The worker-bee to-day is an over-intellectual 
neurotic, morbidly dutiful creature, while the drone 
is admittedly nothing but a stupid, happy, sensual 
lout. If the extreme difference between the sexes 
in bee-life had been aboriginal, the relations of drone 
and worker, as we see them in the hives to-day, 
would be meet and reasonable enough ; but there 
seems to be clear evidence that, far back in the life 
of the race, the female bee was not so hopelessly 
superior to her mate. The queen-bee, in all likeli- 
hood, fairly represents the mother-bee as she was 
before the cooling crust of the earth made some sort 
of protected habitation necessary, which led first 
to close clustering for mutual warmth, and then 
gradually developed the complicated hive-life of 
to-day. But evolution will hardly account for all 
that we see : revolution must have had its part in 
the production of the modern self-unsexed worker. 
It has been seen that there is no physiological reason 
why each worker in the hive should not have grown 
into the fertile mother of thousands. The workers 
are not a stunted, specialised race, slowly evolved 
by time and necessity, and procreating their own 
stunted kind ; but each worker is deliberately manu- 
factured to a set pattern by the authorities in the 
hive, obedient to the call of the State. And when did 
the female bees begin this tampering with the springs 



164 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

of life, this improving upon Creation, which was 
the first vital step, failing which the present bee- 
commonwealth had been impossible ? It looks very 
like a superb act of generalship in the great primaeval 
war of sex — a brilliant piece of strategy that gave 
victory at a blow, and rendered the after-steps 
in the scheme of conquest a matter of logical 
sequence. 

The whole question of the artificial production of 
the worker-bee is surrounded with difficulties ; and 
it seems possible, on our present level of knowledge, 
to do little more than state the facts, and there leave 
them. The supremacy of the females in hive-life 
appears to have dated from the time that the vast 
majority deprived themselves, or were deprived by 
their immediate ancestors, of their share in pro- 
creation, and the ovipositor discovered itself as a 
weapon of offence and defence. Before the worker 
bees existed as an armed force, there is no reason to 
suppose that the female bee had a great physical 
advantage over the drone. The queen-bee's pro- 
pensity to thrust her ovipositor into the spiracles of 
her rival, and so effectually to despatch her, as well 
as her inveterate hatred of her kind, may both be 
late developments, due to the isolated, artificial 
life she now leads. While the worker is ever ready 
with her sting, the queen uses it so rarely that many 
old experienced bee-keepers of the present time deny 
her altogether the power of stinging. A much more 
natural tendency with her is to bite ; and when it 
comes to the use of the sharp, strong, sidelong jaws, 
the drone has a more redoubtable equipment, than 
any, although he has apparently lost the will and 
sense to use it. 

Whatever the drone may have been in far-off ages, 
the worker-bees have him now well under the iron 
heel of matriarchal expediency ; and they see to it 
that he shall be fit only for the one indispensable office, 
although in that regard they exhaust every ingenuity 
to make him all that his kind should be. It is plain 



THE DRONE AND HIS STORY 165 

they would do without him altogether if that were 
possible. As it is, for nine months in the year there 
are no drones at all, and then only a few hundreds are 
raised in each hive — the bare minimum that will 
ensure the successful mating of the young queens when 
the summer sunshine calls them to their wooing. It 
might be supposed that where there are comparatively 
so few queens to be fertilised — only two or three at 
most from each hive, and these only once in a life- 
time — that even those drones which are now toler- 
ated are in excess of the number required. But a 
cardinal principle in bee-life is that the young queens 
shall choose their mates from another tribe, and so 
ensure a continual influx of new blood to the colony. 
This can only be effected out-of-doors, and as far as 
possible from the parent hive. The strongest im- 
pulse, therefore, of the virgin-queen, when she goes 
off on her mating-flight, is to get away quickly from 
her home surroundings. She flies straight off at 
tremendous speed, and thus has every chance of 
getting unperceived into new country, and so into 
the reconnoitring ground of strange drones. 

Another reason for her extended flight and its re- 
markable pace is that only the strongest and swiftest 
drone of all the pursuing multitude is likely to over- 
take her, and this again makes for the betterment 
of the race. Perhaps there is no parallel instance in 
nature where the selection of the fittest individuals 
to continue a species is so carefully provided for, and 
no doubt this accounts for the high place of the 
honey-bee in the scale of created things. But this 
scheme involves enormous risk to the young queen. 
A hundred dangers lurk on her path. She is a tempt- 
ing morsel for every bird that throngs the air of the 
June morning. Her untried wings may fail her. 
Even if she gets back safely to the bee-garden, she 
may enter the wrong hive, to her instant destruction. 
But she must take her chance of all risks ; and the 
only thing to do is to render her absence from home 
as brief as may be, and her fertilisation as sure, by 



166 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

making the wandering drone-population large enough 
to cover all probable ranges of flight. 

From the very first the drone is nurtured in a 
different way from the worker-bee. The egg is laid 
in a wider and deeper cell ; and during its first three 
days of life the drone-larva is fed with bee-milk, 
probably of a special kind and certainly of more 
generous quantity. After the third day this chyle- 
food is reduced, as is the case with the worker-grub ; 
but while the worker is then given only honey, it is 
certain that the drone-larva receives both honey and 
pollen, and that for a full day longer. In all, it takes 
about twenty-four or twenty-five days to produce 
the perfect drone-bee, as against an average twenty- 
one days for the worker. The queen-bee, as has been 
already seen, is developed in much less time than 
either, little more than a fortnight elapsing between 
the time the egg is laid and the time she is ready to 
gnaw her way out of the cell. 

After the drone is hatched, it will be another two 
weeks or so before he makes his first venture in the 
open air. All this time he has the free run of the 
larder, and steadily gorges himself on honey when he 
is not sleeping off the effects of his surfeit in some snug 
out-of-the-way corner of the hive. But honey is not 
his only, or even his principal, food. Throughout his 
whole life he is constantly fed by the house-bees with 
the rich chyle-food given to him as a larva, and it has 
been proved that if this is withheld from him for the 
space of three days he will die of starvation, even in 
the midst of abundant honey. Thus the worker- 
bees have him completely in their power. 

The first flight of the drones is a stirring event in 
the bee-garden. The common sound of the hives 
goes on practically the whole year through. Every 
sunny midday, when the temperature mounts to 
45° or 5°°» w iH see each hive the centre of a little 
galaxy of singers : it is only the volume of the music 
that varies with the waxing or waning days. But 
with the coming of the drones the whole symphony 



THE DRONE AND HIS STORY 167 

of the bee-garden abruptly changes. They never 
move from their snug indoor quarters until the day 
is wearing on towards noon, and then only in the 
brightest weather. Blundering aggressively through 
the crowd of busy foragers, they rise heavily on the 
wing, and soon the ordinary note of the garden is 
drowned in the new uproar. They seem to come 
almost simultaneously from all hives at once. For 
a minute or two the rich hoarse melody holds the air ; 
and then, almost as suddenly, it dies away, as these 
roystering ne'er-do-wells troop off over hill and dale, 
each to his favourite hunting ground. 

There is a great divergence of opinion as to the 
limits of flight of the drone, but probably he goes 
farther and faster than any have yet credited. His 
magnificent stretch and strength of wing mark him 
for a flier. He is all brute force and lusty energy ; 
and it would be strange if, with but one thing to do 
in life — to gad about in search of amorous adventure 
— he could not do it to a purpose. If a hive of bees 
be removed to a distance in the height of the season, 
some of both workers and drones are sure to find their 
way back to the old spot. This has constantly taken 
place when hives have been carried no farther than 
two miles. But in one case, when the distance was 
more than twice as much, no workers were seen round 
the old hive-station, yet a little company of drones 
was winging aimlessly about the tenantless stool, 
and there can be little doubt that these belonged to 
the removed colony. It is not suggested that they 
deliberately travelled all these miles. The chances are 
that, in their daily flight, they got so far away from the 
new station that they came within the zone of old 
landmarks, and thus naturally went on by the long- 
accustomed ways. 

As a typical instance of a sluggard and idler, the 
drone-bee has enjoyed a vogue in the preparatory- 
school books for ages past. But, whatever his 
primaeval equipment for usefulness may have been, 
it is evident now that he could not labour if he would, 



i68 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

Physically, in all points but that of muscle, as well as 
mentally, he has become degraded to the inferior of 
the worker-bee in every way. He is destitute of all 
those special contrivances with which she is so amply 
furnished. He has no baskets for pollen-carrying, 
nor any of the ingenious brushes and combs which 
she uses to scrape the pollen from herself and others. 
He has neither wax-generating organs, nor leg-pincers 
to deal with wax. His tongue is too short for honey- 
getting. His brain is much smaller than even that 
of the feeble-minded queen. The intricate gland- 
systems, which play so important a role in the daily 
life of the worker, are either completely atrophied in 
the drone or exist only in an elementary state. While 
it has been the communal will of the hive that the 
worker-bee should develop an amazing proficiency of 
mind and body, the same forces have been steadily at 
work to degrade the male-bee into a creature of 
dependence, gradually training out of him all initia- 
tive and idea, except in the one direction. Just as in 
the case of the queen and the worker, drone and 
worker-bee seem hardly to belong to the same 
race. 

And yet, for all his frank incapabilities and lack 
of ideals, the drone offers, in one respect, a refreshing 
contrast to his sour, stern, duty-worshipping sister. 
He is a life-long, incorrigible optimist. He fiddles 
gaily while the city burns. All his misery and 
mourning would not serve to quench a single spark 
of it ; so he eats, drinks, and is merry, with the in- 
tuition of all drones that Nemesis waits on the morrow 
with something disagreeable. It is impossible to study 
his ways for long without recognising the spirit of 
rude jollity and horse-play that thoroughly pervades 
all he does. In and out of the hive he blusters, 
cannoning roughly against all he meets, and raising 
his burly, bullying song in the air as a sort of protest 
against all this anxious industry going on about him. 
Once gone from the neighbourhood of the hive, he 
seems to keep incessantly on the wing until hunger 



THE DRONE AND HIS STORY 169 

prompts him home again. For no one has ever seen 
a drone-bee among the insects that haunt the flowers, 
nor ever seen him basking on a sunlit wall or tree- 
trunk, after the kind of almost every other winged 
atom in the universe. 

He comes back to the hive with the same noisy, 
careless fanfaronade, and is received by the workers 
with the same sullen indifference. They give him 
his fill of bee-milk, linking tongues with him as he sits 
up like an overgrown baby, voracious, clamouring 
to be fed. They suffer him to swill at the honey- 
stores unchecked, but plainly regard him with con- 
tumely. He is a terrible expense to the State, yet a 
necessary one. Silently they go about their uncon- 
genial business of nourishing him — silently, and with 
an ominous patience. They grudge him every drop, 
and, all the more, urge him to his excesses. It is 
not for long. The day of reckoning is near at hand. 
Already the poppies glow scarlet on the hill — the 
poppies that mark the turning-point of the summer ; 
and after them the long decline, with its ever-dimin- 
ishing sun-glow ; each day with a scantier meed of 
blossom, until the path runs again into the dreary 
levels, the sober greys and russets, of winter 
death. 

Now the worker-bee is to show a grizzly seam in 
her nature, matching ill with the fine hues and quali- 
ties of mind for which she is so justly famed. And 
that she is not all lovable, all admirable, accounts 
for the exceeding love of her that moves the hearts 
of men who know her through and through. The 
story of the massacre of the drones has hardly a 
parallel for sheer relentless ferocity — unrecking 
abandonment to a vengeance long withheld for ex- 
pediency^ sake. There come the first chill nights of 
mid- July, and the honey-flow is suddenly at an end. 
The clover and sainfoin have already fallen to the 
sickle. Nothing but the bravest warmth and exu- 
berance of the summer could now withstand the 
drain of the myriad honey-makers, and a few hours' 



f/o THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

cold dams up at once the attenuated stream. The 
time of prosperity is over. There will be no more 
abundance of honey. It remains for the genius of 
hive-economy to prove how much of what has been 
gathered can be preserved for future needs. 

The first sign of the debacle is the throwing out at 
the hive entrance of certain pale, gruesome objects — 
the corpses of immature drones, not dead from mis- 
chance, but ruthlessly torn from their cells. This 
may go on intermittently for many days, and while 
the fell work is proceeding the living droixes seem to 
take no warning. They keep up their merry round ; 
the unending feast riots forward ; daily the bee- 
garden is filled with their careless, overweening song. 
And then at last the signal for the slaughter is given. 
Within each hive a curious sobbing outcry begins — 
a cry that is nothing but sheer terror put into sound. 
The drones no longer lie in easy ranks between the 
combs, placidly sleeping off one debauch and dream- 
ing of another. They are all awake now, and fleeing 
abjectly for their lives through the narrow ways of 
the bee-city, the workers in hot pursuit. 

The deep, vibrant, horror-laden note increases hour 
by hour. As each executioner overtakes her victim, 
she grips him by the base of the wing ; and, helped 
by others all alike infuriate at the work, she half 
drags, half pushes him through the throng, until she 
has him in the light of day, and tumbles with him 
to the ground ; he for ever fighting and struggling, 
and uttering that frenzied note of fear ; she savagely 
gnawing at the wing until it is disabled, and he can 
never more return to the hive. Many of the strongest 
drones escape from their persecutors for the time 
being, and fly away unhurt. But it is only for a 
few hours. Hunger is sure to bring them back to 
the hive, when the waiting guards fall upon them, 
and maim or drive them off once more. It is specially 
to be marked that the bees never sting the drones at 
this great annual feast of carnage. There is that 
much method in the madness which has seized upon 



THE DRONE AND HIS STORY 171 

them ; for, in the rough-and-tumble of such a con- 
flict, stings would be plucked out by the roots, and 
thus valuable lives would go down with the worth- 
less. The sole object seems to be to rid the hives as 
effectively as possible of the presence of the drones ; 
and the disablement of one wing appears to be all 
that is necessary, and therefore all for which the 
deft assassin strives. 

With some bee-races the massacre of the drones is 
carried through in an incredibly short space of time ; 
with others the agony of the thing is drawn out for 
days together. The wretched sires of the hive are 
caught between two evils, each as fatal as the other. 
If they fly off to the fields, starvation and the night- 
chills will swiftly bring about their end. If they 
return to the hive, a still speedier death awaits them. 
Night and day, at this time, the guard-bees are 
doubled and re-doubled at the city-gates ; and there 
is little chance of the wiliest drone outwitting them. 
But he usually takes the home-hazard ; and sooner 
or later comes blundering in, receiving with open 
arms, as it were, his share of the knife, as Huddlestone 
faced the Carbonari. 

All this is the common way with the bee-republic, 
when the season goes as it should ; and the hive is in 
possession of a mother-bee — young, strong, and of 
proved fecundity. But there are times when the 
drones — for all their great expense and drain on the 
wealth of the colony — are suffered to live on until 
the late autumn, or even to remain unmolested 
throughout the winter and following spring. If the 
bee-master sees drones about a hive, when other 
colonies have long ago made a good riddance of them, 
he well knows what ails the stock. Its queen is old 
and failing ; and these astute amazons have given 
reprieve to their male-kind until a new mother-bee 
can be raised and properly mated. It is a case of 
mercy to the drones tempered with so much justice 
to themselves that the original virtue is large dis- 
counted, 



172 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

And where the drones are carried through the 
winter, it is ever a sign that the hive is not only 
without a queen, but never will contrive one, of their 
own race. Yet they know that, in the preservation 
of the drones, they have at least one indispensable 
element for their salvation, and — who shall gainsay 
it of the sovereign honey-bee ? — perhaps they rely on 
the bee-master to guess their plight, and furnish them 
with another queen, in time to save his property from 
extinction.* 



CHAPTER XV 

AFTER THE FEAST 

AS the year grows in the bee-garden, sq it goes, 
with all but imperceptible tread and tread. 
In southern England, after the seed-hay is down, 
there is little more for the bees to do but prepare their 
hives for the coming winter. The queen is slowly 
weaned from her absorption in egg-laying by a gradual 
change in food. Day by day she receives less of the 
mysterious bee-milk which was her urging and in- 
spiration ; day after day she finds herself the more 
constrained to slake her hunger at the open honey- 
cells with the common crowd. Every day sees fewer 
bee-children born to the hive, and every day sees 
more and more of the old workers — worn out with a 
short six weeks or so of summer toil — pass away in 
that inexplicable fashion, using, perchance, their last 
strength of wing to hie them to the traditional grave- 
yard of their kind. What becomes of them all, not 
the wisest among beemen knows ; but it is certain 
that, as they lived by communal principle, in the 
same faith they die ; and their last act may be the 
truly collective one — of removing their own bodies 
out of the way of harm to the cherished State. 



AFTER THE FEAST 173 

With the waning months, the population of the 
hive decreases visibly, and, as their numbers fail, 
the temper of the bees suffers just as evident a change. 
Old bee-keepers know by sharp experience that early 
autumn is a time when vigilance well repays itself. 
For all life the season of autumn has its peculiar tests 
and trials of character ; and this is especially true with 
regard to the honey-bee. Each strain of bees has its 
proclivities, good or bad, which are sure to come to 
the front at this season. And, more than any, bad 
qualities will show themselves, now that the rush of 
the year's work is over, and the common energy must 
take its course through an ever shallowing and 
straitening way. 

To find rank dishonesty in a creature of so small 
account in creation as an insect, is rather startling 
to old-fashioned ideas ; but it is nevertheless beyond 
dispute than some stocks of bees are prone to develop 
a tendency to housebreaking and robbery of their 
neighbour's goods during early autumn and, in a 
lesser degree, when the first scanty supply of nectar 
begins in early spring. 

Virgil, and almost ail the classic writers, give stir- 
ring accounts of the frequent battles among bees in 
their day. We are told of vast conflicts taking place 
in mid-air, of the kings leading forth their hosts oi 
warriors — the din of carnage — the wounded and 
dying falling like rain out of the blue of the summei 
sky. These descriptions have always been a great 
puzzle to modern students of bee-life, because nothing 
of the kind seems to take place at the present day. 
Each hive goes about its business, apparently in 
complete disregard of the existence of other hives. 
Neither at home, nor abroad in the fields, are reprisals 
ever witnessed among bees, whether singly or col- 
lectively. The most peaceable creature in the world 
is the honey-bee, except in the single case when her 
home is being wantonly assailed. 

But in autumn frequent encounters take place 
between robber-bees and the hive they are attacking, 

G 



174 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

and one is constrained to believe that it is of this 
Virgil writes. 

Perhaps when once a stock has discovered that 
stealing honey is a much quicker and easier method 
of obtaining it than by the laborious process of gather- 
ing, these particular bees will never again be won 
back to honest courses. Not only will the parent 
hive continue to break out in this way at the close of 
every season, but all swarms from the same hive are 
certain to develop the like tendencies. The strain 
will be a continual source of annoyance and loss to 
the bee-master, and, if he be wise, he will' take the 
shortest and surest way of putting an end to the 
trouble, by promptly changing the queen, and thus 
in the end exterminating the original stock. Where 
this is in his own garden, there will be no difficulty in 
the matter ; but often the robbers are wild bees, 
brigands inhabiting a hollow tree in some neighbour- 
ing wood, and making sudden raids upon their law- 
abiding neighbours in adjacent villages, after the 
manner of brigands all the world over. The strangers 
have often a peculiar appearance, which singles them 
out immediately from the legitimate members of the 
gardens. They are darker in colour and shinier ; 
and they have a bold, yet furtive, way of getting 
about, which suggests at once the prowling 
marauder. 

Wandering among the hives on a fine September 
morning, you may see several of these light-fingered, 
sinister folk hovering about the entrance to a hive, 
or trying to creep in unobserved. Their presence is 
promptly detected, and a sudden hubbub arises as 
the guard-bees set upon the intruders and drive them 
off. There is no doubt of their intention. They are 
spies from the robber camp, and their object is to 
discover those hives which are weak in population, 
and so will fall the easier prey to the depredators 
when in force. Strong stocks have little to fear from 
robbers ; they can always hold their own against 
attack, and therefore are seldom molested. 



AFTER THE FEAST 175 

These scouts disappear for a time, and the hive 
settles down to its wonted, busy tranquillity. But 
soon a little blur of bees may be seen coming over 
the hedge-top, and making straight for the selected 
hive. There is no more crafty reconnoitring. It 
is to be battle undisguised. The robbers descend 
upon their prey, and at once a terrific uproar begins, 
a desperate hand-to-hand fight between besiegers 
and besieged. Left to themselves, the weak stock 
will have little chance from the outset. It is quickly 
overcome. And then a curious thing often happens. 
The bees of the home-colony which have survived the 
fight, join forces with the victors, and themselves 
help to rifle and carry away to the robber's lair the 
treasure which is their own by right. Luckily, the 
bee-master has an all but unfailing preventive of this 
vexatious trouble ready to his hand. He can safely 
leave all those hives which are numerically strong of 
citizens to take care of themselves, and those which 
are weak of population he can join together in twos 
or threes, converting them also into strong, self- 
protective colonies. The modern movable-comb 
hive is a power in the hands of the capable beeman, 
for the comb-frames from several hives can be placed 
together in one, and the bees will unite quite peace- 
ably at this season, if all are well dusted with a flour- 
dredger, or treated with a scent-spray, so that in 
odour and appearance they may be alike. Probably 
every hive has its own distinct odour, which is shared 
by all its denizens, and this is no doubt the means by 
which the sentinel bees at the entrance recognise their 
own comrades, while they promptly fall upon all inter- 
loping strangers. 

The preparation of the hive for the winter is of 
a piece with all else that the bee undertakes. As 
the area of the brood-nest shrinks, the empty cells 
are filled with honey, this being brought down from 
the store-cells farthest away. The foragers keep 
steadily at work whenever the weather holds, gather- 
ing up the remnants of the feast and bringing them 

G 2 



176 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

home to swell the winter-larder. Where there is 
much ivy, a fine October will often see the hives as 
busy again as ever they were in the bravest days of 
June ; but the throng of bees is manifestly smaller. 
The rich song of life begins later in the day, and lasts 
only during the brightest hours ; and that wonderful 
night-sound, the deep underground thunder of the 
fanning bees, is gone from the bee-garden, just as 
the scent of the clover-nectar, brewing and steaming 
in the hives, no longer drifts across in the darkness, 
rilling the bee-master's house with the fragrance he 
loves more than all else in the world. 

The old ragged-winged bees, that have stood the 
brunt of the season, are now, too, nearly all gone. 
The hives are rilled with bees of the same race, in- 
spired by the same traditions ; but they are at the 
beginning of life, the raw recruits of destiny, a mere 
stop-gap crew. They have no memories of the time 
when work was a fever, a tumultuous race with the 
sun, in which the swiftest must lag behind. They 
have never known the overweighty cargoes, the 
bursting honey-sacs, and pollen-panniers so laden 
that they could be scarce dragged into the hive, and 
they will never know them. These bees, born late 
in the season, have their lot cast in the torpid back- 
waters of their little world. Theirs is to be but a 
dreary eking out of days, so that they may have 
strength enough to warm the first spring broods into 
life. The few hot days that burn in the midst of the 
snows of each English March — immeasurably far off 
now, and unattainable, seemingly — will be all they 
will ever see of the power of sunshine. Winter bees 
are born to the prison-house ; and in it, and for it; 
live and die. 

At the most, a worker-bee sees but six months of 
life : at the least — and this is the lot of many — she 
withstands the incessant wear and tear of her hard 
calling for six, or possibly eight, weeks. Thus, though 
the hive may be always packed with citizens, the 
population is for ever changing, Half a dozen times 



AFTER THE FEAST 177 

in the year, perhaps, and for a score of years, you 
may go to your bee-garden, and each time move 
among tens of thousands to whom you are an utter 
stranger, and whom you have never seen before. 
And yet, in all its customs, its propensities, its tradi- 
tions, the life of the bees is Continuity personified. 
You may go round the world, and spend ten years 
on the journey ; and, coming back to the old leafy 
nook of the country, rind the old green hive still in 
its corner under the lilac, still the centre of what 
seems the same crowd of winged merchant-women 
sailing home under the same gay colours, singing the 
old glad songs, building the old wondrous fabrics in 
the darkness, transmuting the same fragrant essences 
into the same elixir of gold. And what is this mys- 
terious thing called the Bee-Commonwealth, which 
is alone immortal, while all that composes it, and 
pertains to it, and upholds it, passes and dies ? 

You must not forget the queen-bee here. She 
alone, it must be remembered, persists year in and 
year out, while generation after generation of her 
children grow up and die about her — a hundred 
thousand of them, may-be, in each twelve-month, 
thousands even between one single summer dawn 
and the dusk of the western sky. Methuselah of old, 
on the more moderate human scale, must have had 
some such experience — must have divined the broader 
plan of life from the incessant repetitions of chance 
and change that passed before him. The power to 
generalise into symbols comes only to the ancient of 
days ; and he of all men had learnt to fathom, to 
estimate, to winnow out the sober drab grain from 
the glittering, rainbow chaff of life. Over and over 
again he must have kept the true true to itself with 
one wise word, and turned back the false, dazzled 
and discomfited, with one flash from his mirror of 
the ages. He was a living history-book, where all 
men might read the common drift and outcome of 
life ; and as a record of the hive's story, a living 
archive for its plans, its systems, its ideals, the 



178 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

mother-bee may exist to day— she who, in compari- 
son with its ever coming and going thousands, is an 
age-old, imperishable thing. 

And so you may think of her, in the short days 
of December twilight, or in the interminable night- 
darkness full of the raging of the winter wind, gather- 
ing her children about her, and telling them tales of 
their forbears' prowess ; teaching them old bee-songs 
which have but the one refrain of work and winning ; 
and never forgetting her own little story— of the one 
brief hour of her love-flight and marriage; bought 
and paid for by widowhood lasting her whole life. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE MODERN BEE-FARM 

IT is well enough to consider the scientific side 
of hive-life for its intrinsic interest, to treat 
it for what it really is — one of the most absorbing 
studies available for leisure hours. But the honey- 
bee is something more than a wonder-maker, or a 
peg on which to hang dilettante moraiisms. Rightly 
treated and exactly understood, she can be made of 
great use in the world. 

There are two things in this England of ours which 
profoundly astonish all who love bees, and have a 
true conception of their possibilities. Travel where 
you may in the land, the last thing you are likely to 
meet with is a bee-farm, or even a few hives in a 
cottage-garden ; while every 3^ard of your way has 
its nook of blossom, and every mile its stretch of 
flowery pasture, where, in sober truth, tons of honey 
are annually running to waste. All this could be 
garnered and sold to the people at little trouble and 
great profit, if only enterprise would wake up from 
its island-lethargy and stretch forth the hand. But 



THE MODERN BEE-FARM 179 

the years dribble uselessly by, and nothing is done. 
Here and there a wide-awake husbandman gets a 
little township of hives together, sells in the neigh- 
bourhood all the honey his bees make, and puts to 
his pocket a gold and silver lining. But this is only 
a drop in the ocean, and the British people must 
send abroad for their honey, which they do to the 
pretty tune of more than £30,000 a year. 

Hitherto, reasoning backward from effect to cause, 
it would seem that farming has been remunerative 
only when undertaken on a large scale ; but those 
who can read the signs of the times tell us that the 
age, just dawning to the country-side, will be the 
age of the small man. And this must mean that 
the hereditary aristocracy among crops — wheat, oats, 
barley — will slowly give place to little-culture : in 
a word, that the land will be made to produce, not 
the things that tradition and our yeoman family 
pride have ordained as the be-all and end-all of 
farming, but the minor, humble necessities for which 
each town and village should look to the good brown 
earth immediately about it, but at present looks in 
vain. Farmers' ladies may then no longer sit in 
their drawing-rooms and ride in their carriages, but 
that will be a change for the simpler, more propor- 
tionate. Those who live in towns have little con- 
ception of it ; but the country-dweller knows well 
what complexity and luxury have got into the old 
English farmhouses, for all the outcry about hard 
times ; how the farmer's wife no longer goes to her 
dairy, nor makes any of the good old farmhouse 
things that served to uphold country England in days 
gone by ; and how the master-agriculturists now are 
the sinews of the great London Stores, while the 
little local shopkeepers are left to the field-labourer 
with his twelve or fifteen shillings a week. 

For the class of small-holders that must now 
multiply throughout the length and breadth of the 
land, there is awaiting an enterprise — a source of 
livelihood — as yet hardly tapped. A stock subject 



180 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

of envy with most artisans is the capitalist who leads 
an easy life while his factory hands toil for hirn. 
But if the small-holder will take up bee-keeping, he 
too can look on, to a large extent, while his thousands 
of winged labourers are filling his storehouse with 
some of the most useful and saleable merchandise in 
the world. It is a truism in commerce that a good 
supply creates a demand just as certainly as that the 
universal want of a thing stimulates its production. 
One of the needs in England to-day is a full, good, 
and cheap supply of honey ; and when this is forth- 
coming there will be little fear but that the present 
demand will increase hand over hand. 

There are many reasons why the people should 
choose honey for their principal food rather than the 
beet sugar which is now so largely consumed. In the 
first place, honey is a pure, natural, undoctored 
sweet, while in the manufacture of ordinary sugar 
the use of more or less noxious chemicals seems to 
be indispensable. When a stock of bees must be 
artificially fed, and common grocers' sugar is used 
for the purpose, the result is generally that half the 
stock is poisoned by the chemicals with which the 
sugar has been treated at the mill. And if this is 
its effect on bees, the inference must be that it cannot 
prove altogether wholesome for men. But its purity 
is not the chief reason why honey should be the 
universal sweet-food of the people. Honey is the 
ordinary sugar of nectar concentrated and converted 
into what is chemically known as grape-sugar ; and 
thus, in ripe honey, the first and most important part 
of digestion is already effected before it leaves the 
comb. This explains why so many delicate people, 
and particularly children, can assimilate food 
sweetened with honey, when they can take no other 
form of sweet. 

Doctors are continually finding some new virtue 
in honey. Its gently regulating action has been long 
known, and there is good authority for stating that 
there is not an organ in the human body which does 



THE MODERN BEE-FARM 181 

not benefit from its habitual use. In all wasting 
diseases, and triumphantly in consumption, it will 
prevail as an up-builder when everything else fails. 
There is no doubt at all that cases of consumption 
have been entirely cured by a liberal diet of honey ; 
and, notoriously, honey is the main ingredient in 
nearly all patent medicines for diseases of the chest 
and throat. Therapeutic hints from laymen are 
generally looked upon askance by medical men — at 
least, by those of the old-fashioned type ; yet, on 
the chance that this page may come under the eye 
of some of the more elastic-minded, the thing may 
be hazarded. There are many who believe in it, and 
with good reason, as a sovereign specific where the 
disease is a wasting one. It is nothing else than the 
once famous Athole Brose, which, as all Scottish 
bee-keepers know, consists of equal parts of good 
thick honey, preferably from ling-heather, and of 
cream, and of mature Scotch whisky from the pot- 
still. Little and often is the rule for its administra- 
tion, but, unlike most old wife's remedies, faith has 
nothing to do with its wonder-working. Scepticism 
is a soil in which it seems to flourish as well as any. 

The man of business, resolved to take up bee- 
keeping as a livelihood, must, at the outset, decide 
on what scale he will carry the matter through. 
There are two aspects of the thing, each more alluring 
than the other, according to the temperament and 
point of view. There is the Simple Life and the 
bee-garden — a life spent in the green quiet of an 
English village, within reach of a market town, where 
the produce of the hives may be disposed of. And 
there is the greater enterprise, the foundation of a 
bee-farm on an extensive scale, and on the most 
approved scientific principles, where the object is to 
supply the great central markets at a distance rather 
than the immediate local needs. 

In the establishment of a bee-farm the first care 
must be the choice of a suitable district. The nature 
of the surrounding country must largely govern the 



[82 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

systems on which the farm can be most profitably 
worked. The first maxim in successful beemanship 
is to get all hives filled to the brim with worker-bees 
by the time the great honey-flow sets in. This time, 
however, varies according to the district. In the 
orchard-country we need bees early ; in heather- 
districts we want them late. In south-west England, 
where the country is half fruit-ground and half moor- 
land, the hives must be huge in population both late 
and early. But where the bee-keeper follows the 
sheep-farmer — and there is no better guide to honey 
than the sheep — his true policy is to work his colonies 
slowly and steadily up to their greatest strength by 
the time the main feed-crops come into blossom, 
which is seldom before the middle of May. And all 
these considerations land us on the brink of a very 
vexed question in modern bee-craft — whether bees 
should be artificially fed, and if so, how and when ? 

If only the purest cane-sugar is used, and the syrup 
well boiled and never burnt, there is nothing to say 
against the practice on the score of harm to the 
stocks. Where early bees are wanted, it is absolutely 
necessary to give them a continuous supply of sugar- 
syrup from the first moment that breeding com- 
mences in the hives. Chemically, the sweet con- 
stituent in nectar is almost identical with that from 
the sugar-cane ; and sugar-syrup has this advantage 
over honey given— that it more nearly simulates the 
natural flow. The bees responsible for the nursery- 
work in the hive and the regulation of the queen's 
fecundity, are young bees that have never yet flown. 
They can, therefore, only judge of the progress of the 
season by the amount of nectar and pollen coming 
into the hive. Where this is steadily increasing day 
by day — and it is this regular natural progress in 
prosperity which the bee-keeper must strive to 
imitate in artificial feeding — the nurse-bees gain con- 
fidence, and brood-raising forges rapidly ahead. 

But sugar-syrup and pea-flour are not natural foods 
for bees, and there is little doubt that a prolonged 



THE MODERN BEE-FARM 183 

course of such diet tends to lower the tone and 
stamina of the race, and thus may prepare the way 
for disease. The golden rule in the matter seems to 
be that artificial feeding should be resorted to only 
where strength of stocks is necessary to secure the 
harvest, or where actual starvation threatens. In 
purely heather-districts, when the big population is 
quite early enough if it is to hand in late June, 
nothing short of imminent starvation should induce 
the bee-master to give artificial, and therefore un- 
avoidably inferior, food. In sheep-country the same 
rule holds. Except in the most unfavourable years, 
a hive, headed by a young and vigorous queen, can 
be relied upon to get itself into the finest fettle by 
the time the main crops are ready for exploitation. 
In this case the beeman has only to make certain 
from time to time that no stock is in absolute want 
of the ordinary means of subsistence. 

But in those warm, favoured regions of the south- 
west, the lands of the apple-blossom and the heather, 
where there is a very early and a very late harvest 
to be gathered, a different system must be pursued. 
Here we touch on the second grand principle of 
successful bee-keeping — the necessity for having in 
all hives only the most prolific mother-bees. For 
profitable honey-getting a queen should seldom be 
kept beyond her second year. After that she is 
usually of little account, and should be superseded, 
either by the bee-master or the bees. But where a 
queen has been over-stimulated by feeding to raise 
an immense population in the spring of the year, she 
is rarely capable of another supreme effort in the 
autumn. The best policy, therefore, if the heather 
harvest is an important one, is to remove the old 
queens as soon as the spring work is over, and to 
substitute for them queens that are in their best 
season, but at the beginning of their resources instead 
of at the end. In this way another huge army of 
workers is soon born to the hive, and the double 
harvest is secured. 



1 84 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

On the question of the best hive to use in com- 
mercial bee-keeping, on either a large or small scale, 
it is hard to particularise. Generalisation, however; 
is not difficult here. Every bee-master has his own 
ideas as to details, but all are happily agreed on the 
main constructive principles. Experience has fairly 
well decided that a good queen, under the modern 
system of intensive culture, will require for her brood 
a comb-surface of about 1,800 square inches. A 
brood-nest of smaller capacity than this is liable to 
cramp her operations at their highest, and anything 
in excess of it will simply mean so much new honey 
lost to the super-chambers, where alone the bee- 
master requires it. Honey stored in the brood-nest, 
except during the off-season, is loss instead of gain. 
The best hive, therefore, will contain just as many 
brood-combs in movable frames as will ensure the 
right capacity ; and all comb-frames throughout the 
bee-farm must be of the same size, so that they will 
be strictly interchangeable among the various hives. 
This is a vital point in successful bee-culture, because 
it enables the master not only to equalise the strength 
of his stocks by transferring combs of hatching brood 
from one to the other ; but he can also give to 
penurious stocks frames of sealed honey from the 
abundance of their neighbours, and he can unite the 
weak colonies, thus rendering all strong. 

For the rest, the hives must be so made that heat 
will be perfectly retained in the cold season, and as 
perfectly excluded during the sultriest time of year. 
Double walls round the brood-chamber are a necessity 
in the changeable British climate, where chilly days 
are always probable during ten months out of the 
twelve. 

As well as honey-production, the bee-farmer will 
find an equal source of profit in the production of 
wax. Just as there is nothing like leather, beeswax 
holds its own as a marketable commodity in spite of 
paraffin substitutes. But if it is almost universally 
degraded by adulteration, the fault lies with the 



BEE-KEEPING AND THE SIMPLE LIFE 185 

beemen, who have never seriously attempted to meet 
the demand for it. Wax-production on a large scale 
is perfectly feasible, and there is little doubt that it 
could be developed into an important British in- 
dustry, as it used to be in mediaeval days. Yet these 
are times of revolution : the honey-bee may yet find 
herself entirely restored to her old national avocation 
— of bringing light to our darkness, and to our bodies 
one of the best and purest of foods. 



CHAPTER XVII 

BEE-KEEPING AND THE SIMPLE LIFE 

IT is a quality of English sunshine that it comes 
and goes capriciously, so that no man may be 
sure of the comradeship of his shadow from day 
to day. But when there is sunshine in England, it 
always seems an abiding, permanent force. The grey 
of yesterday, and the patter-song of the rain on the 
leaves, were only a dream. You were sleeping under 
the changeless blue of a summer night, and had but a 
vision of weeping, drab skies, gone now with the joy 
that comes in the morning. And to-morrow, when 
perhaps the old wild scurry of storm-cloud is alive 
overhead, and all the house resounds with the runnel- 
music from the pouring eaves, still it will be only a 
dream. Of a surety you will tell yourself so, as the 
sun breaks through the griddle of cloud, and the wind 
relents, and the Dutchman can get to his tailoring ; 
and when you are stepping out amidst the swamp 
and glitter and rehabilitation of life, as glad of it all 
as the finches and butterflies that sweep on before 
you down the lane. The sun shines : you know it has 
always shone, changeless as Time itself. 

With such a faith — unfounded and therefore in- 
contestable — I came under the glow of one brave 



1 86 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

June morning, threading field after field of blossoming 
clover until I stood at the gate of the bee-garden over 
against the hill. With its name I had long been 
familiar, for in the county paper there was always 
the little five-line advertisement, quaintly worded, 
announcing honey for sale. But I had never yet seen 
it, nor, indeed, ever set foot in this part of the good 
Sussex land. So, on this brimming June morning, 
giving rein for once to the indolent Shank's mare of 
moods that is fated to carry me, I set out into the 
bright sloth, the joyous hastelessness of the day ; 
and came at length to my destination — to 'the bee- 
garden that nestles under the green Downland hills. 

It was girt about with a tall hedge of hawthorn, 
smothered in snowlike blossom, with just that rosy 
tinge upon it which is the first hectic of decay. 
Beyond the hedge I could see, stretching aloft, green 
apple boughs, whose full-blown posies were alive with 
the desperate humming energy of countless bees. 
There was a blue wisp of smoke trailing idly away 
from a chimney-stack, all that could be seen of the 
snug thatched cottage within ; and there were voices, 
a leisurely baritone, a sudden peal of laughter high- 
pitched and obviously a woman's, and now and then 
a bar or two or an old song sung in an intermittent, 
absent-minded way. 

In one of the pauses of this song, I raised the latch 
of the gate. Its sharp click drew to its full lean 
height a figure at the end of the garden, which was 
bending down in the midst of a wilderness of hives. 
As the man came towards me coatless, his rolled- 
up shirt-sleeves baring wiry brown arms to the hot 
June sun, I took in all the busy, quiet picture. The 
red- tiled, winding path, the sea of old-fashioned 
garden-flowers on every hand, billows of lilac and red- 
may and laburnum, shadowy blue deeps of forget- 
me-nots, scarlet tulips amidst them like lighthouses, 
and drifting shallows of amber mignonette. A decent 
house stood hard by, its windows bright and clean as 
diamond-facets. There was a gay flicker of linen on 



BEE-KEEPING AND THE SIMPLE LIFE 187 

a line beyond. An old dog lolled in a straw-filled 
barrel. A cat kept company with a milk- jug on the 
spotless doorstep. And everywhere there were bee- 
hives, each of a different harmonious shade of colour, 
not ranged in stilted rows, but scattered here and 
there in twos and threes in the orderless order be- 
loved of bees and unsuburban men. 

The bee-master had keen grey eyes, set deep in a 
sun-blackened, honest face, and the ever-ready 
tongue of him was that of the beeman all the world 
over. He was ripe and willing to talk of his work, 
explaining what he was, and what he had done, as we 
slowly wandered through his domain. He was a 
Londoner — he told me — at least, that was his fate 
half a dozen years ago — a City clerk, pale as the 
ledger-leaves that fluttered through his fingers from 
nine to six of the working day. And at home, in a 
dreary desert of housetops called Nunhead — whither 
may an unkind fate never lure me — his sisters sewed 
for a living, white-faced as himself. But one day, 
in an old second-hand book-shop, he lit upon a three- 
penny treasure — a book on the management of bees. 
He read it as his train crawled homeward on one 
stifling, freezing, fog-bound winter's night ; and 
there and then, in the mean, dirty cattle-box of a 
third-class carriage, in fancy was inaugurated the 
bee-garden, that has since developed into all I saw 
around me on that brave morning in June. 

It was a long time in the doing, he told me, as we 
sauntered among the busy hives, speaking with a de- 
lightful Sussex intonation already veneered upon his 
Cockney brogue — a long and weary and scraping 
time. There was money to be saved, the capital 
needed for the enterprise ; and this was no easy 
matter out of a total family income of forty shillings 
a week. But at last it was done, and well done. 
There came a day when the three of them shook the 
dust of Nunhead from their feet, and took over pos- 
session of the little tumble-down cottage with its bare 
half -acre of neglected ground. Well, those were hard 



1 88 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

times to begin with — he said, with an unaccountable 
relish in the recollection ; — but now, look how all 
was changed ! He waved a triumphant, proudly 
proprietary arm around him. The cottage was sound 
and well furnished throughout. The three or four 
bought hives, with which he had started his business, 
had multiplied into sixty or seventy, all made by his 
own hands. Where had he got the bees ? Well, 
that threepenny book had taught him a secret — the 
art of bee-driving. Nearly all the cottagers for miles 
round were in the habit of sulphuring their bees to 
get at the honey. The first autumn, and every 
autumn since then, he had gone to his neighbours and 
told them he would take the bees out of the hives for 
them, and leave them all the combs and a good trink- 
geld into the bargain, if they would let him have the 
bees for his trouble. And they were more than will- 
ing. And thus he had gradually built up his little 
principality of hives. 

But, the profit of the thing ? This, indeed, was 
nothing much to boast of. He sold all the honey and 
wax he got, sending it away, for the most part, by 
post, and extending the circle of his custom by little 
and little with every year. Taking the bad years 
with the good, he had made a net return of £2 for 
every hive ; in bumper-seasons it was always much 
more. It was not a great deal, but there were only 
three of them, and their wants were simple. Their 
greatest needs — fresh air, peace and quiet, the health- 
ful life of the country — these were to be had for 
nothing at all. And as for clothes — you never know, 
until you give over trying to keep up appearances, 
how very little appearances count in the world. At 
any rate, for them, the whole thing was a complete 
success. There were men round about that country- 
side who farmed whole provinces, and still grumbled ; 
but here was he, getting peace and plenty from half 
an acre ; and as for the girls, they did nothing but 
laugh and sing all day long. 

Thus we wandered and talked ; and I — feigning 



SEE-KEEPING AND THE SIMPLE LIFE 189 

ignorance of bee-matters, lest he might think I was 
but carrying coals to Newcastle in clumsy charity — 
bought *oney, and asked many questions ; and 
slowly the entire meaning of what had been done by 
these emancipated slaves of City clerkdom was re- 
vealed. Tfe bee-master pushed his old straw hat 
back over hit clever forehead, and lit the most com- 
fortable pipe I had ever set eyes on. He had evi- 
dently thought the whole thing out long ago, and got 
it down to its essential elements 

" What we are doing here," he said, " could be 
done by hundreds of others who are still in London 
in what was once our old plight. Large bee-farms 
are all very well, but they are more or less a thing 
of the future — something that is still to be evolved 
out of twentieth-century needs. But the bee-garden 
has its immediate use and place in every district 
where there is an average population. People gene- 
rally have got out of the habit of eating honey because 
it is so seldom on sale in the shops ; but if you steadily 
and continuously remind them of it, they will buy, 
and soon grow to wonder how they did without it for 
so long. But it must be set before them in an attrac- 
tive way. Run-honey must be bright and pure to 
look at, and neatly bottled and labelled. If you sell 
honey in the comb, the section-boxes must be spot- 
lessly clean and white. In that old book that first 
led me to bee-keeping, it says that only the English 
bee should be kept, because it is a better honey- 
gatherer. But, from the salesman's point of view, 
there is a much more weighty reason for abjuring all 
foreign strains of bees. English bees leave a thin 
film of air between the honey and the cell cappings, 
and the result is that the comb always looks perfectly 
white. But nearly all foreigners fill their cells to the 
brim, and this means that the finest honeycomb will 
have a dark and dirty appearance, and no one will be 
tempted to buy. That is the sort of thing a business- 
man thinks of first, so the old training days in London 
have not been altogether without their use even here." 



190 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

The song, aloof and desultory, that I ha* heard 
from the garden-gate, was growing clears as we 
walked ; and now we turned the house-corner, and 
came upon more hives, with a neat, girlish figure 
busy among them ; and, hard by, a ti-iy laundry- 
shed, wherein I caught a glimpse of brovn arms deep 
in a wash-tub, and heard the last stanza of the 
vagulous song. 

" Hetty, there," explained the bee-master, " helps 

in the garden, and Helps, did I say ? Why, 

she is far and away a better hand at it than I ! There 
is so much in hive-work that needs the light touch 
which only a woman can give. And Deborah, she 
keeps house for us. Did you know that the word 
Deborah was Hebrew for a honey-bee ? But come 
and see where I make the hives on. winter days, and 
where we sling the honey, and fill the super-crates 
with the sections, and all the rest of it." 

He showed me then his workshop and a little 
gauze-windowed shed where there was a home-made 
honey-extractor — a cunning, centrifugal thing by 
which the combs could be emptied and restored 
unbroken to the bees, to be charged again and again. 
And there was a storehouse, where long rows of honey- 
jars, and stacks of sections, and blocks of pale yellow 
wax were waiting for the purchaser, and a packing- 
shed where the post-boxes of corrugated card!, oar d 
were made up. Finally there was pointed out to me, 
in a far-off corner of the garden, a donkey — shaggy, 
well-fed, placidly browsing — and, under a neigh- 
bouring pent-roof, a little cart that was a curiosity 
in its way. Its wooden tilt was made to represent a 
big beehive, and on it was painted the name of the 
bee-garden and a list of hive-products which it carried 
for sale. The bee-master put an admiring hand 
upon it. 

" It was all Hetty's idea," he said. " London girls 
for pluck, you know ! And she goes into the town 
with it once a fortnight in the season ; takes it away 
crammed full, mind, and never brings back an ounce ! 



BEE-KEEPING AND THE SIMPLE LIFE 191 

Somehow or other, I think those girls ought to change 
names ! '' 

Journeying back to the railroad-station under the 
eternal English sunshine and through the chain of 
blossoming fields, I listened to the chant of the bees 
around me ; and though it was the familiar sound of 
a lifetime, there was something in it then which I had 
never heard before. The rich note rose and fell ; 
died down to silence as the path led through impreg- 
nable red-clover ; swelled again as the land paled to 
the rosy hue of the sainfoin ; burst out into a loud, 
glad symphony where a patch of charlock blent its 
despised, uncoveted gold with the farmer's drill. 
" You thought you knew our ways of life from Alpha 
to Omega " — so seemed to run, in fancy, the wavering 
refrain. " You have pried upon us day and night, in 
season and out of season. You have chloroformed 
us, vivisected us, torn our dead sisters limb from limb 
to feed the cruel, glittering eyes of that binocular of 
yours. You have come at last to think that there 
was nothing about us, within or without or round 
about, that you had not got to know. And here a 
common City clerk, turned tail on his hereditary 
duty, has shown you, in one short hour, a whole sheaf 
of things about us which you — Peeping Tom that you 
are ! — in a whole life's keyhole-prying have never 
guessed. Out upon you ! You deserve to have to 
do with nothing better than bumble-bees for the rest 
of your days ! " 

For the more I thought of little bee-gardens, such 
as the one I had just visited, established here, there, 
and everywhere throughout the land, the plainer it 
became that this, after all, was a mission for the 
honey-bee that had quite escaped me ; and the fonder 
of the idea I grew. With bee-keeping on a grand 
scale there was the difficulty that an apiary might 
become too large for the resources of the country 
about it, although it is all but certain that crops grown 
specially for bees can be made to pay. But a small 



192 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 

garden could never exhaust the land within ics neces- 
sary three-mile radius, and all the nectar its bees could 
gather would be obtained free. Nunhead has done 
it gloriously, thought I, tramping steadily onward 
through the clover. And why not all the other 
Nunheads that hem in the great cities ? There must 
be plenty who love the dust and din, and are willing 
to stop there ; so the little band of bee-gardeners 
will never be missed. 

And there was something else I thought of, too, as 
I strode along under the English sunshine which lasts 
for ever, swinging my box of superfluous, yet much- 
prized honey as I went. 

The song and that pleasant ripple of laughter — 
they were in my ears still, and mingling with the 
labour-song of the wayside bees. Now, only a dozen 
miles or so, away over the hill-tops in the blue Sussex 
weald, I knew of just such another bee-garden, where 
two brothers — not Londoners this time, but true-born 
Downland lads — had well established themselves, 
were getting comfortably off, but were still single men. 
And only a week ago they had deplored this fact to 

me, and But hold ! Match-making was never 

yet to be reckoned part of the Lore of the Honey-Bee. 



INDEX 



Advice to Bee-masters, 

Butler, 24 
After-swarms, 131 
Athol Brose, 181 
Ancient Roman Hives, 15 
Anglo-Saxon Bee-keeping, 

15 
Antennae of Bee, Functions 

of, 106 
Ants and Bees, Analogy in 

Swarming, 123 
Aristotle's Bee-lore, 2 
Artificial Food for Bees, 

182 
Barat-Anac, the Country 

of Tin, 1 3 
Bee-bikes, 95 

breeding, 34 

burning, 34 

city : problems involved 
in construction, 140 

colony, Progress of, 67 

craft, Mediaeval, 32 

culture in Ancient Brit- 
ain, 14 

driving, 188 

farming, Success in, 181 

garden, Profits of, 181 

gardens, Scarcity of, in 
England, 178 
Bee-generation, 22 

hives, in First Century, 3 

in Mythology, ix 

keeping as a Livelihood, 
181 
in Anglo-Saxon Times, 

17 
Modern, 33 
larva, Spinning of Cocoon, 
94 



Bee-life, Study of, 100 

the Old-Age Problem 
in, 91 
lines, 155 

masters, Mediaeval, 20 
milk, its Nature and 

Uses, 84, 114 
monarchy, 22 
scouts in Swarming, 128 
stings, 36 
superstitions, 28 
under Microscope, 101 

Bees and Birds, 59 

and Holy Wafer, Story 

of, 25 
and Spiders, 28 
Cleansing-flights, 62 
English and Foreign, 152 
from Dead Lion, 32 
Generated in Flowers, 22 
in Ancient Egyptian 
Times, x 

Bees, Knowledge of, among 
Ancients, 19 

Bees' Sense of Smell, 43 

Breathing-system of Bee, 
112 

British Beer (?) in Third 
Century, B.C. 15 

Brood-cells, Cappings of, 96 
Dimensions of, 74 
nest, Globular Form of, 21 

Butler's " Feminine Mon- 
archic," 23 

Chapel built by Bees, 25 

Classic Bee-fathers, 19 

Comb built Upwards, 150 
cell, Reasons for Hex- 
agonal Shape of, 92, 
142 



193 



194 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



Comb-construction, 68, 136, 
141 
Evolution of, 92 
Mathematics of, 144 
Supposed Laws of Mutual 
Interference and Pres- 
sure in, 146 
Preservation of Verti- 
cal! ty in, 149 
Communal Mind in Hive, 47 
Corsica's Tribute of Wax to 

Romans, 12 
" Country Housewife's Gar- 
den," 29 
Dead Bees, Method of 

Bringing to Life, 32 
Decline of Mead-drinking 

among Saxons, 18 
Discipline in Hive, 10 
Divine Origin of Bees, 4 
prone, 10, 29, 30, 51, 81 
and Worker-eggs, Theory 

of Laying, 8-^ 
His Place in the Hive, 
164 
Drone-breeding Queen, 76 
cells, 148 

%, 7 
Drones in Winter, 171 

Mid-day Flight, 44 

Slaughter of, 170 
Egg-stealing by Bees, 77 
Emergency Comb, 138 
English Black Bee, 53 
Ethelwold's Allowance of 

Mead to Monks, 17 
Evolution in Hive-life, 

xv, 54 
Eyes of Bee, Compound and 

Simple, 106 
Fanning-army, 41, 64 

Strength of Air-current, 
42 
Fertile Worker, Anomaly 
of, 99 



First Bee-hunter, xiv 

Flight of Bee, Mechanism 
of, 108 
Extent of, 155 
of the Drones, 166 

Foot of Bee, Construction 
of, 104 

Freemasonry of Bee-keep- 
ing, 135 

" Further Discovery of 
Bees," by Rusden, 1679, 
22 

Glandular Systern of Bee, 

US 
Guard-bees of Hive, 43 
Hexagonal Principle in 

Hive, 92 
Hive, Division of Labour 
in, 58 

life, System and Order in, 

87 
Preparation for Winter, 

175 
Hiving Swarms, 125 
Honey as Hair-restorer, 

a Manufactured Product, 

153 
and Sugar : Comparative 
Values as Food, 180 
" Honey-bearing Reed," 16 
Honey-bee, Origin of, 54 
bees, . Varying Intelli- 
gence of, 98 
bee's Year, Beginning of, 

53 
comb, Construction of, 

94 
crops, 156 
dew, 157 

flow, Duration of, 66, 153 
from the Skies, 4 
Imports, 179 
in Mediaeval Cookery, 16 
in Middle Ages, 17 



INDEX 



195 



Honey, Medicinal Proper- 
ties of ,31, 180 
Preparation of, for Mar- 
ket, 189 

Huber's Leaf-hive, 21 

Ideal Hive, The, 184 

Infant Mortality in Bee- 
life, 43 

Insects : Reasons for Bodily 
Construction, 109 

Isle of Honey, 15 

Italian Bee, 53 

Jaws of Bee, Construction 
of, 106 

Larva-cocoons, Differences 
in, 94 

Larvae, Hatching of, 49 

Laying Queen's Attendants, 

73 

Legs of Bee, 102 

Life of the Hive, 37 
of the Queen, 82 

Longevity of Bee, 1 1 

Master-Bees, 29 

Matriarchy in the Hive, xiv 

Mead : Ancient Recipe, 18 
in Anglo-Saxon Times, 17 
like Canary-sack, 19 
making, Modern, 18 

Modern Bee-culture : Its 
Influence on Bee-life, 
132 
Hive, Capacity of, 65 

Morat, 17 

Moses Rusden, King's Bee- 
Master, 22 

Nectar : Temperature re- 
quired for its Secretion, 
158 

Night in the Bee-Garden, 

4i 
Nursery- work in the Hive, 

49 
Oil of Wax, 31 
Old Bee-garden, 35 



Overseers in Hive, 44 
Oxen-born Bees, 5 
Oxymel, •" 

Parthenogenesis, 72 y 84 
Pigment, 17 
Pliny and the Bee, 8 
Pliny's Mirror-stone Hive, 

20 
Poison-sac of Bee : Its 

Contents, 154 
Pollen from Evening Prim- 
rose, 23 

gathering, 22, 38 

loads, Homogeneity of, 

39 
Sources of, 38 
Prehistoric Man and Honey 

Bee, xiii 
Propolis : Its Nature and 

Uses, 39, j 40 
Queen and Worker : Differ- 
ences in Bodily Struc- 
ture, 70 
Eggs, Identity of, 69 
Queen bee, 23, 28, 47, 49, 

59 
Apparent Rulership of, 

66 
Battle-cry of, 114, 133 
Death of, 79 
Duration of Life, 177 
Fecundity of, 50 
Fertilisation of, S3 
Hatching of, 78 
Her Mating-flight, 50, 80 
in Swarming-time, 123 
Physiology of, 70 
Rearing of, 71 
Supersession of, 75 
the Original Female Bee, 

68 
Workers' Management of, 

84 
cell, Construction of, 68, 

76 



196 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



Queen bee larva, Feeding 
of, 78 
Rearing of, 68 
Queenless Hives, 72, 99 
Queens : Five in Single 
Hive, 65 
Mutual Antagonism, 79 
Plurality of, in Hive, 65 
Reason and Instinct, 48 
" Ringing the Bees/' 

Roman Origin of, 26 
Robber-bees, 98, 173 
Samson and the Lion, 8 
Sanitation in the Hive, 61 
Sexes, Proportion of, in 

Hive, 85 
Sex-question in Hive, xiv 
Sirius, the Honey-Star, 9 
Skep, Ancient Method of 

Dressing, 26 
Small-holder and Bee-keep- 
ing, 179 
Socialism and Hive-life, 51, 

89 
Soot-fungus, 158 
Sororicide in the Hive, 83 
Sources of Honey, 159 
Sting of Bee, Construction 

of, ti8 
Sugar-cane, First Introduc- 
tion of, 16 
Swarm-hiving, First Cen- 
tury, 4 
in Middle Ages, 26 
Swarm in May, 120 
Legal Rights in, 27 
Site selected by, 128 
Swarming, 26 
Impulse, 66, 120 



Swarming, Objects of, 131 

Signs of, 125 
Temper in Bees, 152 
Temperature of Hive, 63, 

in 
Tongue of Bee, Construc- 
tion of, 105 
Undertakers in Hive, 43 
Variation in Hive-rules, 65 
Ventilation of Hive, 41, 63 
Virgil as Bee-master, 2 
Voice-apparatus of Bee, 113 
Wax, 11, 136 

Ancient Sources of, 1 1 
Bees' Method of Working, 

138 
in the Bronze Age, x 
Medicinal Properties of, 

30 
making, Food Consumed 

during, 11 1 
production, a Profitable 

Industry, 184 
Water, Need of, in Hive, 58 
Winter-feeding, Method of 

59 
life in Hive, 60 
Worker-bee, 57, 59, 162 
Age of, 59, 176 
Artificial Creation of, 89 
Birth of, 96 
Early Life in Hive, 97 
Glandular System of, 97 
Supremacy of, in Hive, 

47 
Various Occupations of, 

87 
larvas, Feeding of, 89 



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